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WHY GO TO COLLEGE 



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The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to 
the Area of the Cadet Barracks 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 



BY 
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER 

Author of "College Men and the Bible" 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

19ia 






Copyright, 1912, by 
The Cektuby Co. 



Published, October, 1912 



(gCI.A320655 



WITH GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY 

COLLEGE TEACHER AND FRIEND 

E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS 



CONTENTS 

CHAFTEB PAGE 

I General Characteristics 3 

II Education a la Carte 51 

III The College Campus 93 

IV Reasons for Going to College .... 135 

V The College Man and the World . .173 

Index 203 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to the 

Area of the Cadet Barracks Frontispiece 

PA&E 

Old South Middle, Yale University . 9 

A Protest against Prosiness 21 ; 

University Hall, University of Michigan 36 

The Serpentine Dance after a Football Game 44 

Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University . . . 53- 

The Library, Columbia University 67 

A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture 

Room 81 / 

Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American College 96 

Amateur College Theatricals 113 

The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin 123 

Blair Arch, Princeton University 141 

Editors of the Harvard 2/a«ipoo« making up the "Dummy" 

of a Number 155 

The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue, University of 

Virginia 166 

Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, University 

of Chicago 179 

The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Tri- 
angle, University of Pennsylvania 193 



PREFACE 

The characteristics of a college course de- 
manded by our American undergraduates is 
determined by two things ; first, by the charac- 
ter of the man who is to be educated, and sec- 
ond, by the kind of world in which the man is 
to live and work. Without these two factors 
vividly and practically in mind, all plans for 
courses of study, recreation, teaching, or 
methods of social and religious betterment are 
theoretical and uncertain. 

Aften ten years of travel among American 
college men, studying educational tendencies in 
not less than seven hundred diverse institutions 
in various parts of the United States and Can- 
ada, it is my deep conviction that the chief need 
of our North American Educational system is 
to focus attention upon the individual student 
rather than upon his environment, either in 
the curriculum or in the college buildings. 

A few great teachers in every worthy North 
American institution who know and love the 
boys, have always been and doubtless will con- 

xi 



PREFACE 

tinue to be the secret of the power of our 
schools and colleges. There are indications 
that our present educational system involving 
vast endowments will be increasingly directed 
to the end of engaging as teachers the greatest 
men of the time, men of great heart as well as 
of great brain who will live with students, 
truly caring for them as well as teaching them. 
We shall thus come nearer to solving the prob- 
lem of preparing young men for leadership 
and useful citizenship. 

That this is the sensible and general demand 
of graduates is easily discovered by asking any 
college alumnus to state the strongest and 
most abiding impression left by his college 
training. Of one hundred graduates whom I 
asked the concrete question, "What do you 
consider to be the most valuable thing in your 
college course?" — eighty-six said, substan- 
tially: "Personal contact with a great teacher." 
Clayton Sedgwick Cooper. 

March 12th, 1912. 



Xll 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 



Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable 
ofBce, — to teach elements. But they can only highly 
serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; 
when they gather from far every ray of various 
genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concen- 
trated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. 
Thought and knowledge are natures in which ap- 
paratus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and 
pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, 
can never countervail the least sentence or syllable 
of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges wUl 
recede in their public importance, whilst they grow 
richer every year. 

Emeesou. 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

THE American college was recently de- 
fined by one of our public men as a 
"place where an extra clever boy may go and 
still amount to something." 

This is indeed faint praise both for our in- 
stitutions of higher learning and for our under- 
graduates; but judging from certain pres- 
entations of student life, we may infer that it 
represents a sentiment more or less common 
and wide-spread. Our institutions are crit- 
icized for their tendency toward practical and 
progressive education; for the views of their 
professors; for their success in securing gifts 
of wealth, which some people think ought to go 
in other directions ; and for the lack of serious- 
ness or the dissipation of the students them- 
selves. Even with many persons who have not 
developed any definite or extreme opinions 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

concerning American undergraduate life, the 
college is often viewed in the light in which 
Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded 
Oxford : 

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged 
by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! 
There are our young barbarians, all at play! 

Indeed, to people of the outside world, the 
American undergraduate presents an enigma. 
He appears to be not exactly a boy, certainly 
not a man, an interesting species, a kind of 
"Exhibit X," permitted because he is custom- 
ary; as Carlyle might say, a creature "run by 
galvanism and possessed by the devil." 

The mystifying part of this lies in the fact 
that the college man seems determined to keep 
up this illusion of his partial or total depravity. 
He reveals no unchastened eagerness to be 
thought good. Indeed, he usually "plays up" 
his desperate wickedness. He revels in his un- 
mitigated lawlessness, he basks in the glory of 
fooling folks. As Owen Johnson describes 
Dink Stover, he seems to possess a -v" diabolical 
imagination." He chuckles exuberantly as 
he reads in the papers of his picturesque public 

4 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

appearances: of the janitor's cow hoisted into 
the chapel belfry; of the statue of the sedate 
founder of the college painted red on the 
campus; of the good townspeople selecting 
their gates from a pile of property erected on' 
the college green ;' or as in graphic cartoons he 
sees himself returning from foot-ball victories, 
accompanied by a few hundred other young 
hooligans,' marching wildly through the streets 
and cars to the martial strain. 

There '11 be a hot time in the old town to-night ! 

In other words, the American student is 
partly responsible for the attitude of town to- 
ward gown. He endeavors in every possible 
way to conceal his real identity. He positively 
refuses to be accurately photographed or to re- 
veal real seriousness about anything. He is 
the last person to be held up and examined as 
to his interior moral decorations. He would 
appear to take no thought for the morrow, but 
to be drifting along upon a glorious tide of in- 
dolence or exuberant play. ' He would make 
you believe that to him life is just a great frolic, 
a long, huge joke, an unconditioned holiday. 

5 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

The wild young heart of him enjoys the shock, 
the offense, the startled pang, which his rest- 
less escapades engender in the stunned and un- 
sympathetic multitude. 

This perversity of the American undergrad- 
uate is as fascinating to the student of his real 
character as it is baffling to a chance beholder, 
for the American collegian is not the most ob- 
vious thing in the world. He is not discovered 
by a superficial glance, and surely not by the 
sweeping accusations of uninformed theoretical 
critics who have never lived on a college 
campus, but have gained their information in 
second-hand fashion from question-naires or 
from newspaper-accounts of the youthful es- 
capades of students. 

We must find out what the undergraduate 
really means by his whimsicalities and pictur- 
esque attitudinizing. We must find out 
what he is thinking about, what he reads, what 
he admires. He seems to hve in two distinct 
worlds, and his inner life is securely shut off /" 
from his outer life. If we would learn the col- 
lege student, we must catch him off guard, 
away from the "fellows," with his intimate 
friend, in the chapter-house, or in his own quiet 

6 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

room, where he has no reputation for devil- 
ment to live up to. For college life is not 
epitomized in a story of athletic records or cur- 
riculum catalogues. The actual student is not 
read up in a Baedeker. His spirit is caught 
by hints and flashes ; it is felt as an inspiration, 
a commingled and mystic intimacy of work 
and play, not fixed, but passing quickly 
through hours unsaddened by the cares and 
burdens of the world — 

No fears to beat away — no strife to heal. 
The past unsighed for, and the future 



It is with such sympathetic imagination that 
the most profitable approach can be made to 
the American undergraduate. To see him as 
he really is, one needs to follow him into his 
laboratory or lecture-room, where he engages 
with genuine enthusiasm in those labors 
through which he expresses his temperament, 
his inmost ideals, his life's choice. Indeed, to 
one who knows that to sympathize is to learn, 
the soul windows of this inarticulate, immature, 
and intangible personality will sometimes 
be flung wide. On some long, vague walk 

7 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

at night beneath the stars, when the great deeps 
of his life's loyalties are suddenly broken up, 
one will discover the motive of the undergrad- 
uate, and below specious attempts at conceal- 
ment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome 
spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of 
youth lost in a sense of its own significance, 
moving about in a mysterious paradise all his 
own, "full of dumb emotion, undefined long- 
ing, and with a deep sense of the romantic pos- 
sibilities of life." 

In this portrait one sees the real drift of 
American undergraduate life — the life that en- 
. gaged last year in North American institutions 
of higher learning 349,566 young men, among 
whom were many of America's choicest sons. 
Thousands of American and Canadian fathers 
and mothers, some for reasons of culture, 
others for social prestige, still others for rev- 
enue only, are ambitious to keep these students 
in the college world. Many of these parents, 
whose hard-working lives have always spelled 
duty, choose each year to beat their way 
against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, 
that their sons may possess what they them- 
selves never had, a college education. And 

8 




Old South Middle, Yale University 



gen:eral characteristics 

when we have found, below all his boyish 
pranks, dissimulations, and masqueradings, 
the true undergraduate, we may also discern 
some of the pervasive influences which are to- 
day shaping life upon this Western Continent ; 
for the undergraduate is a true glass to give 
back to the nation its own image. 

HIS PASSION FOR REALITY 

Early in this search for the predominant 
traits of the college man one is sure to And a 
passion for reality. "We stand for him be- 
cause he is the real thing," is the answer which 
I received from a student at the University of 
Wisconsin when I asked the reason for the 
amazing popularity of a certain undergrad- 
uate. 

The American college man worships at the 
shrine of reality. He likes elemental things. 
Titles, conventions, ceremonies, creeds — all 
these for him are forms of things merely. To 
him 

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man 's the gowd for a' that. 

The strain of the real, hke the red stripe in 
11 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

the official English cordage, runs through the 
student's entire existence. His sense of 
"squareness" is highly developed. To be sure, 
in the classroom he often tries to conceal the 
weakness of his defenses with extraordinary 
genius by "bluffing," but this attitude is as 
much for the sake of art as for dishonesty. 
The hypocrite is an unutterable abomination in 
his eyes. He would almost prefer outright 
criminality to pious affectation. Sham heroics 
and mock sublimity are specially odious to him. 
The imdergraduate is still sufficiently unso- 
phisticated to beheve that things should be 
what they seem to be: at least his entire incli- 
nation and desire is to see men and things as 
they are. 

This passion for reality is revealed in the 
student's love of brevity and directness. He 
abhors vagueness and long-windedness. His 
speeches do not begin with description of nat- 
ural scenery; he plunges at once into his sub- 
\ ject. 

A story is told at New Haven concerning a 
preacher who, shortly before he was to address 
the students in the chapel, asked the president 
of the university whether the time for his ad- 

12 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

dress would be limited. The president replied, 
"Oh, no; speak as long as you like, but there is 
a tradition here at Yale chapel that no souls 
are saved after twenty minutes." 

The preacher who holds his sermon in an 
hour's grip rarely holds students. The college 
man is a keen discerner between rhetoric and 
ideas. No decisions are more prompt or more 
generally correct than his. He knows imme- 
diately what he likes. You catch him or you 
lose him quickly ; he never dangles on the hook. 
The American student is peculiarly inclined to 
follow living lines. He is not afraid of life. 
While usually he is free from affectation, he 
is nevertheless impelled by the urgent en- 
thusiasm of youth, and demands immediate ful- 
filment of his dreams. His life is not "pitched 
to some far-off note," but is based upon the 
everlasting now. He inhabits a miniature 
world, in which he helps to form a public opin- 
ion, which, though circumscribed, is impartial 
and sane. No justice is more equal than that 
meted out by undergraduates at those institu- 
tions where a student committee has charge of 
discipline and honor-systems. A child of 
reality and modernity, he is economical of his 

13 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

praise, trenchant and often remorseless in his 
criticisms and censures, for as yet he has not 
learned to be insincere and socially diplomatic. 
This penchant for reality emerges in the plat- 
form of a successful college athlete in a New 
England institution who, when he was elected 
to leadership in one of the college organiza- 
tions, called together his men and gave them 
two stern rules: 

First, stop apologizing! Second, do a lot 
of work, and don't talk much about it ! 



HIS NATURALNESS 

The undergraduate's worship of reality is 
also shown in his admiration of naturalness. 
The modern student has relegated into the 
background the stilted elocutionary and ora- 
torical contests of forty years ago because those 
exercises were unnatural. The chair of elocu- 
tion in an American college of to-day is a de- 
clining institution. Last year in one of our 
universities of one thousand students the course 
in oratory was regularly attended by three. 

The instructor in rhetorical exercises in a 
college to-day usually sympathizes with the re- 

U 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

marks of one Professor Washington Value, 
the French teacher of dancing at New Haven 
when that polite accomplishment was a part of 
college education. At one time when he was 
unusually ill-treated by his exuberant pupils, 
he exclaimed in a frenzy of Gallic fervor: 
"Gentlemen, if ze Lord vere to come down 
from heaven, and say, 'Mr. Washington Value, 
vill you be dancing mast' at Yale College, or 
vill you be etairnally dam'?' I would say to 
Him — ' 'Sieur, eef eet ees all ze sem to you, I 
vill be etairnally dam'.' " The weekly lecture 
in oratory usually furnishes an excellent chance 
for relaxation and horseplay. A college man 
said to me recently : "I would n't cut that hour 
for anything. It is as good as a circus." 

The student prefers the language of natural- 
ness. He is keen for scientific and athletic ex- 
ercises, in part at least because they are actual 
and direct approaches to reality. His college 
slang, while often superabundant and absurd, 
is for the sake of brevity, directness, and vivid 
expression. The perfect Elizabethan phrases 
of the accomplished rhetorician are listened to 
with enduring respect, but the stumbling and 
broken sentences of the college athlete in a 

15 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

student mass-meeting set a college audience 
wild with enthusiasm and applause. 

Henry Drummond was perhaps the most 
truly popular speaker to students of the last 
generation. A chief reason for this popular- 
ity consisted in his perfect naturalness, his ab- 
solute freedom from pose and affectation. I 
listened to one of his first addresses in this 
country, when he spoke to Harvard students 
in Appleton Chapel in 1893. His general 
subject was ^'Evolution." The hall was 
packed with Harvard undergraduates. Colle- 
gians had come also from other New England 
institutions to see and to hear the man who 
had won the loving homage of the students of 
two continents. As he rose to speak, the au- 
dience sat in almost breathless stillness. Men 
were wondering what important scientific word 
would first fall from the lips of this renowned 
Glasgow professor. He stood for a moment 
with one hand in his pocket, then leaned upon 
the desk, and, with that fine, contagious smile 
which so often lighted his face, he looked about 
at the windows, and drawled out in his quaint 
Scotch, "Isn't it rather hot here?" The col- 
legians broke into an applause that lasted for 

16 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

minutes, then stopped, began again, and fairly 
shook the chapel. It was applause for the 
natural man. By the telegraphy of human- 
ness he had established his kinship with them. 
Thereafter he was like one of them ; and prob- 
ably no man has ever received more complete 
loyalty from American undergraduates. 



HIS SENSE or HUMOR 

Furthermore, the college man's love of re- 
ality is kept in balance by his humorous tend- 
encies. His keen humor is part of him. It 
rises from him spontaneously on all occasions 
in a kind of genial effervescence. He seems 
to have an inherent antagonism to dolefulness 
and long-facedness. His life is always break- 
ing into a laugh. He is looking for the breezi- 
ness, the delight, the wild joy of living. Every 
phenomenon moves him to a smiling mood. 
Recently I rode in a trolley-car with some col- 
legians, and could not but notice how every 
object in the country-side, every vehicle, every 
group of men and women, would draw from 
them some humorous sally, while the other pas- 
sengers looked on in good-natured, sophisti- 

17 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

cated amusement or contempt. The whole 
student mood is as Hght and warm and invig- 
orating as summer sunshine. He lives in a pe- 
riod when 

'tis bliss to be alive. 

Rarely does one find revengefulness or sul- 
len hatred in the American undergraduate. 
When a man with these traits is discovered in 
college, it is usually a sign that he does not 
belong with collegians. His place is elsewhere, 
and he is usually shown the way thither by both 
professors and students. Heinrich Heine said 
he forgave his enemies, but not until they were 
dead. The student forgives and usually for- 
gets the next day. The sense of humor is a 
real influence toward this attitude of mind, for 
the student blots out his resentment by making 
either himself or his antagonist appear ridicu- 
lous. 

He has acquired the fine art of laughing both 
at himself and with himself. A story is told 
of a cadet at a military school who committed 
some more or less trivial offense which reacted 
upon a number of his classmates to the extent 

18 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

that, because of it, several cadets were forced 
to perform disciplinary sentinel duty. It was 
decided that the young offender should be 
forthwith taken out on the campus, and ordered 
to kiss all the trees, posts, telegraph-poles, and, 
in fact, every free object on the parade-ground. 
The humorous spectacle presented was suffi- 
cient compensation to sweep quite out of the 
hearts of his classmates any possible ill feeling. 
The faculty song, the refrain of which is 



Where, oh, where is Professor - 
Way down in the world below. 



and is indulged in by many undergraduate 
students, usually covers all the sins and foibles 
of the instructors. One or two rounds of this 
song, with the distinguished faculty members 
as audience, is often found sufficient to clear 
the atmosphere of any unpleasantness existing 
between professors and students. 

Not long ago, in an institution in the Mid- 
dle West, this common tendency to wit and 
humor came out when a very precise professor 
lectured vigorously against athletics, showing 
their deleterious effect upon academic exer- 

19 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

cises. The following day the college paper 
gave on the front page, as though quoted from 
the professor's remarks, "Don't let your stud- 
ies interfere with your education." 

The student's humor is original and pointed. 
Not long ago I saw a very dignified youth 
solemnly measuring the walks around Boston 
Common with a codfish, keeping accurate ac- 
count of the number of codfish lengths em- 
braced in this ancient and honorable inclosure. 
His labors were made interesting by a gallery 
of collegians, who followed him with explosions 
of laughter and appropriate remarks. 

Not long ago in a large university, during 
an exceedingly long and prosy sermon of the 
wearisome type which seems always to be com- 
ing to an end with the next paragraph, the 
students exhibited their impatience by leaning 
their heads over on their left hands. Just as 
it seemed sure that the near-sighted preacher 
was about to conclude, he took a long breath 
and said, "Let us now turn to the other side of 
the character of Saint Paul," whereupon, suit- 
ing the action to the word, every student in the 
chapel shifted his position so as to rest his head 
wearily upon the other hand. 

20 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

RELIGION AND THE COLLEGE MAN 

I have often been asked by people who only 
see the student in such playful and humorous 
moods, "Is the American college man really 
religious?" The answer must be decidedly in 
the affirmative. The college boy — with the 
manner of young men somewhat ashamed of 
their emotions — does not want to talk much 
about his religion, but this does not prove that 
he does not possess the feeling or the founda- 
tion of religion. In fact, at present there is 
a deep current of seriousness and religious 
feeling running through the college life of 
America. The honored and influential stu- 
dents in undergraduate circles are taking a 
stand for the things most worth while in aca- 
demic life. 

The undergraduate's religious life is not 
usually of the traditional order; in fact it is 
more often unconventional, unceremonious, and 
expressed in terms and acts germane to student 
environment. College men do not, for ex- 
ample, crowd into the church prayer-meetings 
in the local college town. As some one has 
expressed it, "You cannot swing rehgion into 

23 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

college men, prayer-meeting-end-to." When 
the student applies to people such words as 
"holy," "saintly," or "pious," he is not intend- 
ing to be complimentary. Furthermore, he 
does not frequent meetings "in derogation of 
strong drink." His songs, also, are not usu- 
ally devotional hymns, and his conversation 
would seldom suggest that he was a promoter 
of benevolent enterprises. 

Yet the undergraduate is truly religious. 
Some of the things which seem at first sight 
quite out of the realm of the religious are in- 
dications of this tendency quite as much as com- 
pulsory attendance upon chapel exercises. 
Dr. Henry van Dyke has said that the college 
man's songs and yells are his prayers. He is 
not the first one who has felt this in listening 
to Princeton seniors on the steps of Nassau 
Hall singing that thrilling hymn of loyalty, 
"Old Nassau." 

I have stood for an entire evening with 
crowds of students about a piano as they sang 
with a depth of feeling more readily felt than 
described. As a rule there was little con- 
versing except a suggestion of a popular song, 
a plantation melody, or some stirring hymn. 

24i 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

One feels at such times, however, that the 
thoughts of the men are not as idle as their 
actions imply. As one student expressed it in 
a college fraternity recently, "When we sing 
like that, I always keep up a lot of thinking.'* 

Moreover, if we consider the college com- 
munity from a strictly conventional or religious 
point of view, the present-day undergraduates 
do not suffer either in comparison with college 
men of other days, or with other sections of 
modern life. The reports of the last year give 
sixty out of every one hundred undergraduates 
as members of churches. One in every seven 
men in the American colleges last season was 
in voluntary attendance upon the Bible classes 
in connection with the College Young Men's 
Christian Association. 

The religious tendencies of the American un- 
dergraduates are also reflected in their par- 
ticipation in the modern missionary crusades 
both at home and abroad. Twenty-five years 
ago the entire gifts of North American institu- 
tions for the support of missions in foreign 
lands was less than $10,000. Last year the 
students and alumni of Yale University alone 
gave $15,000 for the support of the Yale Mis- 

25 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

sion in China, while $131,000 represented the 
gifts of North American colleges to the mis- 
sion cause in other countries. The missionary 
interests of students on this continent are fur- 
thermore revealed in the fact that 11,838 men 
were studying modern missions in weekly stu- 
dent mission study classes during the college 
season of 1909-10. At Washington and Lee 
University there were more college men study- 
ing missions in 1910 than were doing so in the 
whole United States and Canada sixteen years 
ago. 

During the last ten years 4338 college gradu- 
ates have gone to foreign lands from North 
America to give their lives in unselfish service 
to people less fortunate than themselves. Six 
hundred of these sailed in 1910 to fill positions 
in foreign mission ports in the Levant, India, 
China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Australia, and 
South America. 



THE BACCHIC ELEMENT 

Furthermore, the standards of morals and 
conduct among the American undergraduates 
are perceptibly higher than they were fifty 
£6 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

years ago. There is a very real tendency in 
the line of doing away with such celebrations 
as have been connected with drinking and im- 
moralities. To be sure, one will always find 
students who are often worse for their bacchic 
associations, and one must always keep in mind 
that the college is on earth and not in heaven; 
but a comparison of student customs to-day 
with those of fifty years ago gives cause for 
encouragement. Even in the early part of the 
nineteenth century we find conditions that did 
not reflect high honor upon the sobriety of stu- 
dents; for example, in the year 1814 we find 
Washington Irving and James K. Paulding 
depicting the usual sights about college inns 
in the poem entitled "The Lay of the Scottish 
Fiddle." The following is an extract: 

Around the table's verge was spread 
Full many a wine-bewildered head 
Of student learn'd, from Nassau Hall, 
Who, broken from scholastic thrall. 
Had set him down to drink outright 
Through all the livelong merry night. 
And sing as loud as he could bawl; 
Such is the custom of Nassau Hall. 
No Latin now or heathen Greek 
The senior's double tongue can speak. 
27 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

Juniors from famed Pierian fount 

Had drank so deep they scarce could count 

The candles on the reeling table. 

While emulous freshmen, hardly able 

To drink, their stomachs were so full, 

Hiccuped, and took another pull. 

Right glad to see their merry host. 

Who never wine or wassail crost; 

They willed him join the merry throng 

And grace their revels with a song. 

There has probably never been a time in our 
colleges when such scenes were less popular 
than they are to-day. Indeed, it is doubtful 
whether the American college man was ever 
more seriously interested in the moral, social, 
and religious uplift of his times. One of his 
cardinal ambitions is really to serve his genera- 
tion worthily both in private and in public. In 
fact, we are inclined to believe that serviceable- 
ness is to-day the watchword of American col- 
lege religion. This religion is not turned so 
much toward the individual as in former days. 
It is more socialized ethics. The undergradu- 
ate is keenly sensitive to the calls of modern 
society. Any one who is skeptical on this point 
may well examine the biographies in social, po- 
litical, and religious contemporaneous history. 

28 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

In a recent editorial in one of our weeklies it 
was humorously stated that "Whenever you see 
an enthusiastic person running nowadays to 
commit arson in the temple of privilege, trace 
it back, and ten to one you will come against a 
college." President Taft and a majority of 
the members of his Cabinet are college-trained 
men. The reform movements, social, political, 
economic, and religious, not only in the West, 
but also in the Levant, India, and the Far 
East, are being led very largely by college 
graduates, who are not merely reactionaries in 
these national enterprises, but are in a very 
true sense "trumpets that sing to battle" in a 
time of constructive transformation and prog- 
ress. 

THE PLAY LIFE OF THE AMERICAN UNDER- 
GRADUATE 

Undoubtedly one of the reasons which helps 
to account for the lack of knowledge on the 
part of outsiders concerning the revival in col- 
lege seriousness is found in the fact that the 
play life of American undergraduates has be- 
come a prominent factor in our educational in- 

29 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

stitutions. Indeed, there is a general impres- 
sion among certain college teachers and among 
outside spectators of college life that students 
have lost their heads in their devotion to inter- 
collegiate athletics. And it is not strange that 
such opinions should exist. 

A dignified father visits his son at college. 
He is introduced to "the fellows in the house," 
and at once is appalled by the awestruck way 
with which his boy narrates, in such technical 
terms as still further stagger the foiid parent, 
the miraculous methods and devices practised 
by a crack short-distance runner or a base-ball 
star or the famous tackle of the year. When 
in an impressive silence the father is allowed 
the unspeakable honor of being introduced to 
the captain of the foot-ball team, the autocrat 
of the undergraduate world, the real object 
of college education becomes increasingly a 
tangle in the father's mind. As a plain busi- 
ness man with droll humor expressed his feel- 
ings recently, after escaping from a dozen or 
more collegians who had been talking athletics 
to him, "I felt like a merchant marine without 
ammunition, being fired into by a pirate ship^ 
until I should surrender." 

30 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

Whatever the undergraduate may be, it is 
certain that to-day he is no "absent-minded, 
spectacled, slatternly, owlish don." His inter- 
est in the present-day world, and especially the 
athletic world, is acute and general. Whether 
he lives on the "Gold Coast" at Harvard or in 
a college boarding-house in Montana, in his 
athletic loyalties he belongs to the same fra- 
ternity. To the average undergraduates, ath- 
letics seem often to have the sanctity of an in- 
stitution. Artemus Ward said concerning the 
Civil War that he would willingly sacrifice all 
his wife's relatives for the sake of the cause. 
Some such feeling seems to dominate the Amer- 
ican collegian. 

CONCERNING ATHLETICS 

Because of such athletic tendencies, the col- 
lege student has been the recipient of the dis- 
approbation of a certain type of onlookers in 
general, and of many college faculties in par- 
ticular. 

President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating 
competitive scholarship, in a Phi Beta Kappa 
address at Columbia University, said, "By free 

31. 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

use of competition, athletics has beaten scholar- 
ship out of sight in the estimation of the com- 
munity at large, and in the regard of the stu- 
dent bodies.'* Woodrow Wilson pays his re- 
spects to student athleticism by sententiously 
remarking, "So far as colleges go, the side- 
shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in 
the main tent do not know what is going on." 
Professor Edwin E. Slosson, who spent 
somewhat over a year traveling among four- 
teen of the large universities, utters a jeremiad 
on college athletics. He found "that athletic 
contests do not promote friendly feeling and 
mutual respect between the colleges, but quite 
the contrary; that they attract an undesirable 
set of students ; that they lower the standard of 
honor and honesty; that they corrupt faculties 
and officials ; that they cultivate the mob mind ; 
that they divert the attention of the students 
from their proper work; and pervert the ends 
of education." And all these cumulative ca- 
lamities arrive, according to Professor Slosson, 
because of the grand stand, because people are 
watching foot-ball games and competitive ath- 
letics. The professor would have no objection 
to a few athletes playing foot-ball on the desert 

32 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

of Idaho or in the fastnesses of the Maine 
woods, provided no one was looking. "If 
there is nobody watching, they will not hurt 
themselves much and others not at all," he con- 
cedes. 

Meanwhile, regardless of their doom, 
The little victims play. 

In fact, such argument appeals to the average 
collegian with about the same degree of weight 
as the remark of the Irishman who was chased 
by a mad bull. The Irishman ran until out of 
breath, with the bull directly behind him; then 
a sudden thought struck him, and he said to 
himself: "What a fool I am! I am running 
the same way this bull is running. I would be 
all right if I were only running the other way." 
It will doubtless be conceded by fair-minded 
persons generally that in many institutions of 
North America athletics are being over-empha- 
sized, even as in some institutions practical and 
scientific education is emphasized at the ex- 
pense of liberal training. It is difficult, how- 
ever, to generalize concerning either of these 
subjects. Opinion and judgment vary almost 

33 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

as widely as does the point of view from which 
persons note college conditions. A keen pro- 
fessor of one of the universities where ath- 
letics too largely usurped the time and atten- 
tion of students, justifiably summed up the 
situation by saying: 

The man who is trying to acquire intellectual ex- 
perience is regarded as abnormal (a "greasy grind" 
is the elegant phrase, symptomatic at once of student 
vulgarity, ignorance, and stupidity), and intellectual 
eminence falls under suspicion as "bad form." The 
student body is too much obsessed of the "campus- 
celebrity" type, — a decent-enough fellow, as a rule, but, 
equally as a rule, a veritable Goth. That any group 
claiming the title students should thus minimize in- 
tellectual superiority indicates an extraordinary condi- 
tion of topsyturvydom. 

During the last twelve months, however, I 
have talked with several hundred persons, in- 
cluding college presidents, professors, alumni, 
and fathers and mothers in twenty-five States 
and provinces of North America in relation to 
this question. While occasionally a college 
professor as well as parent or a friend of a par- 
ticular student has waxed eloquent in dispraise 

84 




University Hall, University of Michigan 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

of athletics, by far the larger majority of these 
representative witnesses have said that in their 
particular region athletic exercises among stu- 
dents were not over-emphasized. 

Yet it is evident that college athletics in 
America to-day are too generally limited to a 
few students who perform for the benefit of 
the rest. It is also apparent that certain 
riotous and bacchanalian exercises which attend 
base-ball and foot-ball victories have been very 
discouraging features to those who are inter- 
ested in student morality. In another chapter 
I shall treat at some length of these and other 
influences which are directly inimical to the 
making of such leadership as the nation has a 
right to demand of our educated men. In this 
connection, however, I wish to throw some 
light upon the student side of the athletic 
problem, a point of view too often overlooked 
by writers upon this subject. 

In the first place, it needs to be appreciated 
that student athletics in some form or other 
have absorbed a considerable amount of atten- 
tion of collegians in American institutions for 
over half a century. Fifty years ago, even, we 
find foot-ball a fast and furious conflict be- 

37 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

tween classes. If we can judge by ancient 
records, these conflicts were often quite as 
bloody in those days as at present. An old 
graduate said recently that, compared with the 
titanic struggles of his day, modern foot-ball 
is only a wretched sort of parlor pastime. In 
those days the faculty took a hand in the battle, 
and a historical account of a New England 
college depicts in immortal verse the story of 
the way in which a divinity professor charged 
physically into the bloody savagery of the 
foot-ball struggle of the class of '58. 

Poor '58 had scarce got well 

From that sad punching in the bel — 
Of old Prof. Olmstead's umberell. 

It will be impossible to fully represent 
the values of athletics as a deterrent to the dis- 
solute wanderings and immoralities common in 
former times. Neither can one dwell upon the 
real apotheosis of good health and robust 
strength that regular physical training has 
brought to the youth of the country through 
the advent of college gymnasiums and indoor 
and outdoor athletic exercises. Much also 

38 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

might be said in favor of athletics, especially 
foot-ball, because of the fact that such exer- 
cises emphasize discipline, which, outside of 
West Point and Annapolis, is lamentably lack- 
ing in this country both in the school and in the 
family. While there is much need to engage 
a larger number of students in general athletic 
exercises, it is nevertheless true that even 
though a few boys play at foot-ball or base- 
ball, all of the students who look on imbibe the 
idea that it is only the man who trains hard who 
succeeds. 

There is, too, a feeling among those who 
know intimately the real values of college play 
life, when wholesale denunciations are made of 
undergraduate athletics, that it is possible for 
one outside of college walls or even for one of 
the faculty to produce all the facts with accu- 
racy, and yet to fail in catching the life of the 
undergraduate at play. Inextricably asso- 
ciated with college athletics is a composite and 
intangible thing known as "coUege spirit." It 
is something which defies analysis and exposi- 
tion, which, when taken apart and classified, is 
not ; yet it makes distinctive the life and atmos- 
phere of every great seat of learning, and is 

39 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

closely linked not only with classrooms, but also 
with such events as occur on the great athletic 
grand stands, upon fields of physical contest 
in the sight of the college colors, where episodes 
and aims are mighty, and about which historical 
loyalties cling much as the old soldier's memo- 
ries are entwined with the flag he has cheered 
and followed. While we are quoting from Phi 
Beta Kappa orators, let us quote from another, 
a contemporary of Longfellow, Horace Bush- 
nell, whom Henry M. Alden has called, next 
to Emerson, the most original American 
thinker of his day. In his oration before the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard sixty 
years ago. Dr. Bushnell said that all work was 
for an end, while play was an end in itself ; that 
play was the highest exercise and chief end of 
man. 

It is this exercise of play which somehow gets 
down into the very blood of the American un- 
dergraduate and becomes a permanently val- 
uable influence in the making of the man and 
the citizen. It is difficult exactly to define the 
spirit of this play life, but one who has really 
entered into American college athletic events 
will understand it — the spirit of college tradi- 

40 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

tion in songs and cheers sweeping across the 
vast, brilliant throng of vivacious and spell- 
bound youth ; the vision of that fluttering scene 
of color and gaiety in the June or October sun- 
shine ; the temporary freedom of a thousand ex- 
uberant undergraduates; pretty girls vying 
with their escorts in loyalty to the colors they 
wear; the old "grad," forgetting himself in the 
spirit of the game, springing from his seat and 
throwing his hat in the air in the ebullition of 
returning youth; the mercurial crowd as it de- 
mands fair play; the sudden inarticulate si- 
lences; the spontaneous outbursts; the disap- 
probation at mean or abject tricks, — or that 
unforgetable sensation that comes as one sees 
the vast zigzagging lines of hundreds of stu- 
dents, with hands holding one another's shoul- 
ders in the wild serpentine dance, finally throw- 
ing their caps over the goal in a great sweep of 
victory. One joins unconsciously with these 
happy spirits in this grotesque hilarity as they 
march about the stadium with their original 
and laughable pranks, in a blissful forgetful- 
ness, for the moment at least, that there is any 
such thing in existence as cuneiform inscrip- 
tions and the mysteries of spherical trigonom- 

41 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

etry. Is there any son of an American col- 
lege who has really entered into such life as 
this who does not look back lingeringly to his 
undergraduate days, grateful not only for the 
instruction and the teachers he knew, but also 
for those childish outbursts of pride and ideal- 
ism when the deepest, poignant loyalties caught 
up his spirit in unforgetable scenes: 

Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy? 

A friend of mine had a son who had been 
planning for a long time to go to Yale. 
Shortly before he was to enter college he went 
with his father to see a foot-ball game between 
Yale and Princeton. On this particular oc- 
casion Yale vanquished the orange and black 
in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale 
men were marching off with their mighty 
shouts of triumph. The Princeton students 
collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, 
and before singing "Old Nassau," they cheered 
with even greater vigor than they had cheered 
at any time during the game, and this time not 
for Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli 
came back from their celebration and stopped 



X. 




GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

to listen and to applaud. As the mighty tiger 
yell was going up from hundreds of Prince- 
tonian throats, and as the. Princeton men fol- 
lowed their cheers by singing the Yale 
"Boolah," the young man who stood by his 
father, looked on in silence, indeed, with inex- 
pressible admiration. Suddenly he turned to 
his father and said: "Father, I have changed 
my mind. I want to go to Princeton." 

Such events are associated (in the minds of 
undergraduates) not only with the physical, 
but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The 
struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not 
simply to a few men who take part, but to 
every student on the side-lines, while the pul- 
sating hundreds who sing and cheer their team 
to victory think only of the real effort of 
their college to produce successful achieve- 
ment. 

Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers' Field 
at Cambridge, with undergraduates by the hun- 
dred eager in their athletic sports on one side, 
and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, 
there is a simple marble shaft which bears the 
names of the men whom the field commemo- 
rates, while below these names are written Em- 

45 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

erson's words, chosen for this purpose by 
Lowell : 



Though love repine and reason chafe. 
There came a voice without reply — 

'T is man's perdition to be safe. 

When for the truth he ought to die. 

Not only upon the shields of our American 
universities do we find 'Veritas"; in spirit at 
least it is also clearly written across the face 
of the entire college life of our times. Gentle- 
manliness, open-mindedness, originality, honor, 
patriotism, truth — these are increasingly found 
in both the serious pursuits and the play life 
of our American undergraduates. The de- 
partment in which these ideals are sought is 
not so important as the certainty that the stu- 
dent is forming such ideals of thoroughness 
and perfection. This search for truth and re- 
ality may bring to our undergraduates unrest 
or doubt or arduous toil. They may search 
for their answer in the lecture-room, on the 
parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of college 
comradeships, in the competitive life of college 
contests, or even in the hard, self-effacing la- 

46 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

bors of the student who works his way through 
college. While, indeed, it may seem to many 
that the highest wisdom and the finest culture 
still linger, one must believe that the main 
tendencies in the Mfe of American undergradu- 
ates are toward the discovery of and devotion 
to the highest truth — the truth of nature and 
the truth of God. 



47 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 



II 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 



IF I were to return to college, I should take 
nothing that was practical," remarked a re- 
cent college graduate. This attitude reveals 
by contrast a somewhat wide-spread tendency 
of opinion toward practical and progressive 
studies. 

At a public gathering not long since, the 
president of a great State institution in the 
Middle West said that he believed within an- 
other decade every course in the institution of 
which he was the head would be intended sim- 
ply to fit men to earn a livelihood. A culti- 
vated disciple of quiet and delightful studies 
who overheard this remark was heard to say 
almost in a groan, "If I thought that was true 
of American education generally, I should 
want to die." 

An even more significant note of warning 
against merely bread-and-butter studies comes 

51 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

from Amherst College, where the class of 1885 
recently presented to the governing board the 
radical plan of abolishing entirely the degree 
of bachelor of science, with the purpose of 
building up a strictly classical course for a 
limited number of students admitted to college 
only by competitive examinations. The plan 
provides for the raising of a fund to meet any 
deficiency caused by the temporary loss of stu- 
dents and also for the increase of teachers' sal- 
aries. The general idea in the mind of the Am- 
herst committee is expressed as follows: 

The proposition for which Amherst stands is that 
preparation for some particular part of life does not 
make better citizens than "preparation for the whole 
of it"; that because a man can "function in society" 
as a craftsman in some trade or technical work, he is 
not thereby made a better leader; that we have already 
too much of that statesmanship marked by ability "to 
further some dominant social interest," and too little 
of that which is "aware of a world moralized by prin- 
ciple, steadied and cleared of many an evil thing by 
true and catholic reflection and just feeling, a world 
not of interest, but of ideas." Amherst upholds the 
proposition that for statesmen, leaders of public 
thought, for literature, indeed for all work which de- 
mands culture and breadth of view, nothing can take 

52 




Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University 



'«'^-«~-<rV 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

the place of the classical education; that the duty of 
institutions of higher education is not wholly performed 
when the youth of the country are passed from the 
high schools to the universities to be "vocationalized," 
but that there is a most important work to be per- 
formed by an institution which stands outside this 
straight line to pecuniary reward; that there is room 
for at least one great classical college^ and we believe 
for many such. 

These opinions are impressive. No one can 
visit widely our American colleges without 
feeling the appropriateness of such warnings 
and demands. A story is told of the president 
of a college praying in chapel for the prosper- 
ity of his school and all new and "inferior" in- 
stitutions. The prayer would seem to have 
been answered in the last decade, which marks 
the marvelous growth of modern technical in- 
stitutions in America. This growth has been 
specially pronounced in the great State uni- 
versities and in the institutions fitted to train 
men in practical education. 

GROWTH or PRACTICAL EDUCATION 

Dr. William R. Harper is quoted as saying 
shortly before his death that "no matter how 

65 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

liberally the private institution might be en- 
dowed, the heritage of the future, at least in 
the West, is to be the State university." An 
ex-president of a State university has given the 
following indication of ten years of advance 
in attendance of students at fifteen State uni- 
versities in comparison with attendance at fif- 
teen representative Eastern colleges and uni- 
versities : 



1896-97 1906-07 

State universities 16,414 34,770 

Increase 112% 

Eastern institutions 18,331 28,631 

Increase 56% 



Almost any one of our great universities at 
present has many times the wealth, equipment, 
and students of all of our colleges fifty years 
ago. Our American agricultural and me- 
chanical colleges, the greater number of which 
have arisen within ten years, now enroll more 
than 25,000 students. In 1850 there were only 
eight non-professional graduate students in 
the United States. In 1876, when Johns 
Hopkins opened, there were 400 such students. 
There are now at least 10,000 students of this 
class, and every year finds an additional num- 

56 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

ber of our larger institutions including gradu- 
ate courses preparing for practical vocations, 
with many of them adding facilities for gradu- 
ate study during the summer. 

The following more concrete comparison by 
Professor E. E. Slosson reveals the manner in 
which the new State institutions are rapidly 
meeting the demands of modern times for tech- 
nical and professional education; for the chief 
progress in these institutions has been not in 
the old-fashioned culture studies, but in special 
departments, including well-nigh everything 
from engineering and dairying to music and 
ceramics : 



§ 3 •■n B^S^fi-Z^ 

, <j « ■* S 2 '' 225 2 3 o a 

IHSTITOTIONS, fl „.2-2 3 . £^4) S'--S-S 




H <! H ' 

Columbia University $1,675,000 $1,145,000 559 $280 

Harvard University 1,827,789 841,970 573 309 

University of Chicago 1,304,000 699,000 291 137 

University of Michigan 1,078,000 536,000 285 125 

Yale University 1,088,921 524,577 365 158 

Cornell University 1,082,513 510,931 507 140 

University of Illinois 1,200,000 491,675 414 136 

University of Wisconsin 998,634 489,810 297 157 

University of Pennsylvania . 589,226 433,311 375 117 

University of California 844,000 408,000 350 136 

Stanford University 850,000 365,000 136 230 

Princeton University 442,232 308,650 163 235 

University of Minnesota . . . 515,000 263,000 303 66 

Johns Hopkins University .. 311,870 211,013 172 324 

51 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN 
COLLEGE? 

This sudden and enormous advance in the 
pursuit of technical studies, which have made 
the State universities formidable rivals to our 
older, privately endowed institutions, has 
aroused uncertainty as to the real object of col- 
legiate training. Modern commercialism, 
which has said that you must touch liberal stud- 
ies, if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a 
mighty current through our American univer- 
-^sities. The undergraduate is feeling increas- 
ingly the pressure of the outside modern world 
— the world not of values, but of dollars. The 
sense of strain, of rush, and of anxiety which 
generally pervades our business, our public and 
our professional life, has pervaded the atmos- 
phere in which men should be taught first of all 
to think and to grow. 

The present tendency of students is to feel 
that any form of education -that does not as- 
sociate itself directly with some form of practi- 
cal and significant action is artificial, unreal, 
and undesirable. Last winter I visited an in- 
stitution on the Pacific coast where literary 

58 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

studies were considered, among certain classes 
of students, as not only unpractical, but almost 
unmanly. As a result of such drift in educa- 
tional sentiment, the American undergraduate 
is in danger of getting prepared for an emer- 
gency rather than for life. He is losing. 

In action's dizzying eddy whirled. 

The something that infects the world. 

The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. 
He scarcely takes time to see it all plainly with- 
out dust and confusion. There is all about 
him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His 
culture lies upon him in lumps. He does not 
allow it time to impress him. College is a be- 
wildering episode rather than a place of clear 
vision. 

THE NEED OF LEADERS RATHER THAN MONEY- 
MAKERS 

It is far easier to turn out of our colleges 
mechanical experts than it is to create men who 
are thoughtful, men who know themselves and 
the world. The value of the modern man to 
society does not depend upon his ability to do 

59 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

always the same thing that everybody else is 
doing. College men should be fitted to make 
public sentiment as well as to follow it. The 
educated leader should be in advance of his 
period. Independence born of thoughtfulness 
and self-control should mark his thought and 
decision. The world looks to him for assistance 
in vigorously resisting those deteriorating in- 
fluences which would commercialize intellect, 
coarsen ideas, and dilute true culture. His 
hours of insight and vision in the world of art, 
ideas, letters, and moral discipline should as- 
sist him to will aright when high vision is 
blurred by the duties of the common day. His 
clearer conception of highest truth should lead 
him to hope when other men despair. Our 
colleges should train men who will be "trum- 
pets that sing to battle" against all compla- 
cency, indifference, and social wrong. 
^"^When a student, however, puts his profes- 
sion of medicine or engineering before that of 
responsible leadership in social, political, moral, 
and industrial life, he ceases to be a real factor 
in the modern world. _J^e already have a 
thousand men who can make money to one man 
who can think and make other men think. We 

60 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

have a thousand followers to one genuine 
leader who incorporates in his own mind and 
heart a high point of view and the ability to 
present it in an attractive way. It is one thing 
for an undergraduate to go out from his in- 
stitution expert in electrical science; it is quite 
another thing for him to so truly discover the 
spirit of life itself, as to be able to harmo- 
nize his expert ability with the broader and 
deeper life of the age in which he lives. 

The present undergraduate often fails la- 
mentably at this very point. He frequently 
reminds one of the remark of an old gentle- 
man to an old lady whom I saw at a backwoods 
railway-station in Oregon watching a small 
white dog chasing with great zeal an express- 
train which had surged past the station. The 
old lady, turning to her companion, said ea- 
gerly, "Do you think he will catch it?" The 
old man answered, "I am wondering what he 
will do with the blamed thing if he does catch 
it." The college undergraduate likewise is of- 
ten uncertain about what he is to do with his 
profession beyond making a living with it. 
Our colleges, with their technical training, 
should give the conviction that a physician in a 

61 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

community is more than a medical practitioner. 
His success as a physician brings with it an 
obligation of interest and leadership in all of 
the social, civic, and philanthropic movements 
of the town or city in which he works. He 
should discover in college that he is to be more 
than a doctor; that he is to be also a man and a 
citizen. In the last analysis, for real success it 
is not a question whether a man is a great engi- 
neer or a great electrician or a great surgeon; 
it is the question of individual character. 

The pressing inquiry, then, for all under- 
graduate training is. Are we giving to our boys 
the kind of education which will fill their fu- 
ture life with meaning ?._A^man must live with 
himself. He must be a good companion for 
himself. A college graduate, whatever his 
specialty, should be able to spend an evening 
apart from the crowd. The theater, the auto- 
mobile, the lobster-palace, were never intended 
to be the chief end of collegiate education. A 
college course should give the undergraduate 
tastes, temperament, and habits of reading. 
A graduate who studies to be a specialist in 
any line needs also the education which will 
give him depth, background, and the historical 

62 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

significance of civilization and life in general. 
A lady at a dinner-party was making des- 
perate attempts to interest in her conversation 
a certain business man who had been intro- 
duced to her as a graduate of a prominent uni- 
versity. She talked to him of books, educa- 
tion, theater, races, pictures, society, and out- 
of-door life. All of her efforts were futile. 
Finally he said, "Try me on leather ; that 's my 
line." This college graduate lost something 
important in his incompetency for general and 
intelligent conversation. His loss was more 
tragic, however, as a representative of the so- 
called college-educated classes, exponents of 
specialistic training, who have become materi- 
ally successful, but who are without those per- 
sonal resources necessary for their own enjoy- 
ment and profit, and who find themselves ut- 
terly inadequate for guidance or incentive to 
their fellowmen. 

ELECTIVE STUDIES 

The system of elective studies which now 
widely characterizes the training in our higher 
educational institutions has made it increasingly 

63 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

difficult for the college man to secure a clear 
idea of a college course and the comprehensive 
training which is his due. In many institu- 
tions the whole curriculum is in a state of un- 
stable equilibrium. The endeavor to follow 
the demands of the times and the desire to se- 
cure patrons and students, have often brought 
to both the faculty and the undergraduate an 
uncertainty as to the true meaning of the col- 
lege. Even in freshman and sophomore years 
the arrangement of studies is often left to the 
choice of the immature student. In one of 
our oldest universities there is at present only 
one prescribed course of study. For the rest, 
the students are allowed to choose at their own 
sweet will, and their choice, while dictated by a 
variety of motives, is influenced in no small de- 
gree by the preponderance of emphasis, both 
in buildings and faculty, upon technical educa- 
tion. Students are left to flounder about in 
their selection of courses, guided neither by cur- 
riculum nor life purpose. Recently I asked 
twenty-six students why they chose their stud- 
ies. Sixteen of them gave monetary or practi- 
cal reasons; six answered that the studies 
chosen furnished the line of least resistance as 

64 



EDUCATlON^ A LA CARTE 

far as preparation was concerned; and only 
four had in mind comprehensive culture and 
preparation for life. 

I sympathize with the educator who said re- 
cently: 

Is it not time that we stop asking indulgence for 
learning and proclaim its sovereignty? Is it not time 
that we remind the college men of this country that 
they have no right to any distinctive place in any com- 
munity unless they can show it by intellectual achieve- 
ment? that if a university is a place for distinction at 
all, it must be distinguished by conquest of mind? 

While these tendencies threaten, instead of 
criticizing too severely our universities and our 
undergraduates, we should strive first to find 
the reason for these modern scientific and 
practical lines of work; and second, to suggest, 
if possible, definite ways by which a truer har- 
mony in educational studies may be brought 
about. 

EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAK DEMANDS 

The rapid extension of natural-physical sci- 
ence in the last fifty years has had much to do 
with the change of accent in American educa- 

65 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

tion. This change of emphasis has effected a 
distinct transformation in the curriculum, in 
the college teacher and in the student ideal. 

Should one care to get one's fingers dusty 
with ancient documents, one might turn to an 
old leaflet in the files of the library at Colum- 
bia, dated November 2, 1853. It is the report 
of the trustees of Columbia College upon the 
establishment of a university system. Among 
other things this report outlines, in accordance 
with the ideas of the trustees, "the mission of 
the college." 

This mission is, "to direct and superintend 
the mental and moral culture. The design of 
a college is to make perfect the human intellect 
in all its parts and functions; by means of a 
thorough training of all the intellectual facul- 
ties, to obtain their full development; and by 
the proper guidance of the moral functions, to 
direct them to a proper exertion. To form the 
mind, in short, is the high design of education 
as sought in a College Course." The report 
hereupon proceeds to note that unfortunately 
this sentiment, "manifest and just" though it 
be, "does not meet with universal sympathy or 
acquiescence." On the contrary, the demand 

66 







The Library, Columbia University 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

for what is termed progressive knowledge 
. . . and for fuller instruction in what are 
called the useful and practical sciences, is at 
variance with this fundamental idea. The 
public generally, unaccustomed to look upon 
the mind except in connection with the body, 
and to regard it as a machine for promoting 
the pleasures, the conveniences, or the comforts 
of the latter, will not be satisfied with a system 
of education in which they are unable to per- 
ceive the direct connection between the knowl- 
edge imparted and the bodily advantages to be 
gained. The committee therefore "think that 
while they would retain the system having in 
view the most perfect intellectual training, 
they might devise parallel courses, having this 
design at the foundation, but still adapted to 
meet the popular demand." 

We have here one of the early indications 
of "parallel courses" in one of our institutions 
of higher learning as a concession to popular 
demands. But this concession at Columbia 
was made before the immense extension and 
development of modern natural, physical, and 
industrial science. Education or culture in the 
early fifties was something easy to define. It 

69 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

included logic, literature, oratory, conic sec- 
tions, and religion. Since that date, however, 
the American undergraduate has discovered 
modern research work at the German univer- 
sity. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for 
American students with his "golden key." 
The American student has been called upon to 
match with his technical ability the enormous 
and rapid development of a new material civili- 
zation, and educational institutions take color 
from the social and pohtical media in which 
they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily esti- 
mated how real or how comprehensive a factor 
the college graduate has been in guiding and 
shaping this practical and progressive awaken- 
ing. 

The American undergraduate is more than 
ever before contemporaneous with all that is 
real and important in modern existence. He 
is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and 
religious investigation and improvement. 
With self-rehant courage he works his way 
through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and 
performing other real services. He debates 
with zeal economics, immigration, and labor 
questions. Indeed, the modern American uni- 

70 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

versity is taking increasingly firmer hold upon 
the life of the nation. The college graduate 
of fifty years ago was more or less a thing 
apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, 
he was also weak in his attachment to life it- 
self, where education really has its worldng 
arena. In comparison with him, the student 
to-day spends a greater proportion of his time 
in the study of political science. One feels the 
limitation of the modern undergraduate espe- 
cially in the sweep of his literary knowledge, 
and in his acquaintance with abstract thought, 
art, and poetry. But when we see student and 
professor working together on our American 
farms, bringing about a new and higher type 
of rural life ; when we find our mechanical engi- 
neers not only in the mountains and on the 
Western prairies, but in the heart of India or 
inland China or South Africa, building there 
their bridges and railroad tunnels according to 
the ideas seen in the vision of their new practi- 
cal educational training, we are bound to ask 
whether the modern undergraduate is not truly 
interested in the deep aim of all true scholar- 
ship, namely, the spiritual and concrete con- 
struction of life by means of ideas made real. 

71 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

Ambassador Bryce's opinion of the American 
universities carries weight, and of them he has 
said: 



If I may venture to state the impression which the 
American universities have made upon me, I will say 
that while of all the institutions of the country they 
are those of which the American speaks most modestly, 
and indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem 
to be at this moment making the swiftest progress, 
and to have the brightest promise for the future. They 
are supplying exactly those things which European 
cities have hitherto found lacking to America; and 
they are contributing to her political as well as to her 
contemplative life elements of inestimable worth. 

But since undergraduate training must deal 
not simply with the theory of education, but 
also with the imperative demands and condi- 
tions of a new time, there must be discovered 
practical ways by which our undergraduates 
may save their literary ideals at the same time 
that they enlarge their practical and progress- 
ive knowledge; means by which they may dis- 
cover literary, historical, linguistic, and phil- 
osophical values without losing their mathe- 
matics and their physical and material sciences. 

72 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

To the end, therefore, of making cultural 
studies as strong, attractive, and profitable to 
our undergraduates as practical and scientific 
training, our institutions should train men of 
large caliber to teach English and belles-let- 
tres. They should discover great teachers and 
inspiring personalities. 

PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS 

President Oilman of Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity took as his motto, "Men before build- 
ings." The subject of securing great teach- 
ers for students is perhaps the most vital topic 
which can be considered, since from the point 
of view of undergraduates a professor, whether 
teaching civil engineering or Greek, is invari- 
ably influential because of what he is person- 
ally. 

In a large university which I recently visited 
I was told that there were three thousand stu- 
dents and five hundred instructors and pro- 
fessors, an average of a professor to every six 
students. Upon asking several of the under- 
graduates how many professors they knew per- 
sonally, I was somewhat astounded to find that 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

less than a dozen of these six hundred teachers 
came into personal contact with the students 
outside of the classes. One graduate told me 
that he had not been in the home of more than 
three professors during his college course. 

There are undoubtedly reasons for this lack 
of association between the professors and the 
undergraduates. In a large university, the 
demand upon the teacher for more work than 
he should rightfully undertake, the ever-in- 
creasing interest of the student in college af- 
fairs, with many other influences, are con- 
stantly presented as difficulties in the way of 
the teacher's close relationship with the student. 
But the important point in this association be- 
tween student and professor is that in many 
cases the professor has nothing vital and indi- 
vidual to give the undergraduate when he 
meets him. In too many cases he is a dry and 
weary man, living his life in books rather than 
in men. A. C. Benson has described a Cam- 
bridge don in terms that at times we fear fit 
some college professors of our own land. He 
sits "like a moulting condor in a corner, or 
wanders seeking a receptacle for his informa- 
tion." The American college teacher has too 

74 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

often been chosen simply because of his 
scholarship. Our institutions of learning have 
been obsessed with the mere value of the de- 
gree of doctor of philosophy. As a conse- 
quence, many a young professor is scholarly 
and expert in his knowledge of his subject, but 
utterly without ability to impart it with inter- 
est. He lacks driving force as well as guid- 
ing and regulating force. He seems at times 
without the capacity for real feeling. He is 
not alive to the issues of the time in which he 
lives. He starts his subject a century behind 
the point of view in which his scholars are in- 
terested. Too often, alas! he misses the chief 
opportunity of a college teacher in not becom- 
ing friendly with his undergraduates ; for there 
is no comradeship like the comradeship of let- 
ters, the comradeship of knowledge, the com- 
radeship of those whose lives are united in the 
higher aims of serious education. 

Letters have never lacked their fascination 
when they have been embodied in the thought 
and personalities of great teachers. Albert 
Harkness, with his face aglow with literary en- 
thusiasm, reading "Prometheus Bound," in his 
lecture-room in the old University Hall at 

75 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

Providence, is one of the unfading memories 
of my undergraduate days. When Tennyson 
said, "I am sending my son not to Marlbor- 
ough, but to Bradley, the great teacher," it 
was not a subject he had in mind, but a per- 
sonality. In one institution which I visit, 
virtually the entire undergraduate body elects 
botany. A student said to me one day, *'We 
do not care especially for botany, but we would 

elect anything to be under Dr. ." Not 

long ago, attending a college dinner at the Uni- 
versity of Minnesota, I heard a professor at 
my side lamenting the tendency to irreverence 
on the part of American college men. While 
we were speaking, ex-President Northrop 
came into the room, and the entire crowd of 
students were on their feet in an instant, cheer- 
ing their beloved president. One of the un- 
dergraduates closed his remarks by saying that 
the deepest impression of his college days had 
occurred in the chapel when their honored 
president prayed; and he quoted the following 
verse : 

When Prexy prays 
Our heads all bow, 
A sense of peace 
Smooths every brow, 
76 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

Our hearts, deep stirred, 
No whisper raise 
At chapel time 
When Prexy prays. 



THE PROFESSOR IN THE LECTURE-ROOM 

The classroom presentation of the college 
professor is also highly important. Many a 
subject is spoiled for a student because of the 
pedantic, priggish, or solemn manner of the 
teacher. Many a teacher is devoted to his sub- 
ject and painstaking, but his lack of knowl- 
edge as to the use of incident, epigram, and 
enticing speech in presenting his subject, pre- 
vents his popularity and power as a teacher. 
Woodrow Wilson says that he had been teach- 
ing for twenty years before he discovered that 
the students forgot his facts, but remembered 
his stories. We realize that tables of popula- 
tion, weights, and measures, temperatures, 
birth-rates, and dimensions, are at times neces- 
sary, but these should be used in the classroom 
with moderation. 

Too often a teacher takes for granted that 
he has an uninteresting subject, and therefore 
gives up the task of making it attractive. A 

77 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

professor of mathematics, endeavoring to 
evade the obligation for good teaching, gave 
to a professor of chemistry, whose lecture- 
room was always crowded with interested stu- 
dents, the following reason for the unpopu- 
larity of his subject: "The trouble with math- 
ematics is that nothing ever happens. If, 
when an equation is solved, it would blow up 
or give off a bad odor, I should get as many 
students as you." The real reason, however, 
was deeper than the nature of his subject. It 
lay in the nature of the man. He did not 
have the power to bring his subject into vital 
contact with reality and with the hfe of his 
3«*^ students. 

The lecture plan also handicaps many a 
teacher in this important task of getting near 
the student and drawing him out. The semi- 
nar of our larger universities and graduate 
schools help much in individualizing the 
students. Students may be talked to death. 
They themselves often want to talk. An 
undergraduate in the South, after hearing 
a professor who was without terminal facilities, 
told me the old story of Josh Billings, who de- 
fined a bore as a man who talked so much about 

78 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

himself that you could n't talk about yourself. 
In many institutions the students also are 
forced to take too many lectures. Their minds 
become jaded. Thinking is the last thing they 
have power to do in the lecture-room. There 
is little desire or opportunity for intellectual 
reaction; as one professor of a Western imi- 
versity humorously remarked: 

They do not listen, however attentive or orderly they 
may be. The bell rings, and a troop of tired-looking 
boys, followed perhaps by a larger number of meek- 
eyed girls, file into the classroom, sit down, remove the 
expressions from their faces, open their note-books on 
the broad chair-arms, and receive. It is about as in- 
spiring an audience as a room full of phonographs 
holding up their brass trumpets. 

TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY 

The most discouraging moments of my col- 
lege days occurred during the lecture hours of 
history, not because I did not have a natural 
bent for history, but because the professor 
made the topic, for me, uninteresting. My 
mind became a blank almost as soon as I en- 
tered the classroom. Lecture days in history 
covered me with a darkness beyond that which 

79 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

I had ever imagined could emanate from the 
world of fallen spirits. My powers went into 
eclipse. There seemed to be a kind of auto- 
matic cut-off between my brains and my note- 
book. My only source of comfort consisted 
in the fact that my miseries had companion- 
ship. In some examinations, I remember, 
only a small remnant of the class succeeded 
in satisfying the demands of our scholarly 
teacher. 

I can only remember flashes and hints of a 
long, solemn, student face, shrouded with 
whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books 
which seemed only slightly less dry than a re- 
mainder biscuit, droning, in *'hark-from-the- 
tombs-a-doleful-sound" incantation, words, 
which to our vagrant attention were just words, 
belonging to remote centuries, while about me 
my companions shivered audibly, waiting to 
be called up. The professor was called a great 
student of history. He might have been. We 
gladly admitted this: it was the chief compli- 
ment we could pay him. As a teacher and in- 
spirer of boys, however, he was a good example 
of the way to make history impregnable. 

I hold in memory, also, another professor 
80 



'-d 
o 



n 
B 



9= 



d 



O 




EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

who taught history. He was seldom called a 
professor. The students called him "Bemiy." 
There was a kind of lingering affection in our 
voices as we spoke his name. His lecture- 
room was always crowded. No student ever 
went to sleep, no student became so frightened 
that he lost his wits, no student ever took him- 
self too seriously. There was an element of 
humor and humanness which was constantly 
kindled by this great, manly teacher and which 
fired at frequent intervals every student heart. 
His illustrations were not confined to Horatius 
on the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers 
disaster and death, or Luther at Worms. He 
attached history to modern themes. His his- 
torical situations were described not in the 
terms of tedious systems, but in the person- 
alities of great men. We somehow felt that 
he himself was greater than anything he said; 
that he himself was a great man. He found 
interest in the life of college as well as in the 
work of college. He talked about the 
last foot-ball game and the reason why the col- 
lege was defeated and the lessons that men 
should draw from their failure. The value of 
his remarks was enhanced by the fact that most 

83 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

of the men had seen him on the running- 
track in the gymnasimn, or on the front 
row of the grand stand, cheering patri- 
otically with both voice and arms. I remember 
how he used to add driving power to our awak- 
ening resolves and ambitions. We were quite 
likely to forget that we were learning history. 
To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of 
the name "Benny" brings an enthusiasm which 
the most eloquent speech of any other man 
seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man 
who also taught history ; but the man was more 
than his book, he was more than his subject: 
he was the light and the blood of it, and the 
glory of that theme still brightens the path of 
every one of those hundreds of students who 
caught a new and radiant vision of the march 
of events in the light of a great man's eyes. 
It was of such teachers that Emerson must 
have been thinking when he said, "There is no 
history, only biography," and again, "An in- 
stitution is but the lengthened shadow of a 
man." 

It is of such men that other college grad- 
uates think to-day, even as Matthew Arnold 
thought of Jowett at Balliol:. 

84 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

For rigorous masters seized my youth^ 

And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, 

Shew'd me the high, white star of truth. 
There bade me gaze, and there aspire. 



wanted: the great teacher 

But how are we to train such teachers for 
our undergraduates? This is no child's task. 
It is the matchless opportunity of the college; 
it is the crying need of our times. A large 
proportion of undergraduates in college lec- 
ture-rooms are virtually untouched in either 
their feelings or their intellects by the ministry 
of the church. Whatever the ministry may 
have been in our father's times, it is not to-day 
significant or effective in imparting its mes- 
sage to students. The fact is periodically 
demonstrated by test questions of teachers to 
their students concerning the Bible, English 
literature, and church history. I have recently 
visited a dozen of the leading preparatory 
schools whose headmasters and teachers quite 
invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy 
of the Sunday-schools and of religious train- 
ing in the home. Indeed, many students go 
up to our best preparatory schools in almost a 

85 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

heathenish condition as regards religion and 
Christian knowledge. It is the day and time 
of the teacher's ministry in both secondary 
schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day 
is more far-reaching and decisive than the desk 
of the college teacher. The college professor 
who does not forget that he is first a man, then 
a professor, and who can get past the friend- 
ship of books and knowledge to a genuine 
friendship with students, can be the highest 
force in our present day civilization. But the 
teacher says : "I am only a teacher of literature, 
or of chemistry, or of engineering, or of bridge- 
building. I am not an evangelist or a moral 
reformer, or a promoter of polite accomplish- 
ments or of social service." Much of this is 
true also of the great teachers of history. Yet 
somehow these men found in their specialty the 
door through which they entered into the very 
hearts and lives of their school-boys. 

A short time ago at the University of Iowa 
I had the opportunity of meeting at luncheon 
thirty members of the faculty. The subject 
for discussion was: "What can the professor 
do really to assist students at the University 
of Iowa in discovering the values worth while 

86 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

in college life?" Approximately one-half of 
the teachers for various reasons prayed to be 
excused from the discussion. I was specially 
interested in the answers of the other men — ■ 
among whom were the men, according to stu- 
dent testimony, who had a real hold upon the 
university life. One man was of the depart- 
ment of chemistry. He was prominent in stu- 
dent activities. When he was introduced, a 
student said, "There is no man more truly 

liked in the university than Professor ." 

As he talked, we felt that, while he might be a 
good teacher of chemistry, his department was 
chiefly important in giving him a point of de- 
parture from which he could go forth to in- 
terest himself in the life of young men. After 
the conference he said to me : "If professors 
want influence with students, let them appear 
at debates, at athletic games, and at student 
mass-meetings; let them show real interest in 
undergraduate activities of all sorts, even at 
personal sacrifice." 

Another professor was a teacher of English. 
He was not interested in athletics or in the re- 
ligious life of the students so much as in re- 
vealing to students in the classroom as well as 

87 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

outside the classroom the charm of literary- 
things. That was his message — his individual 
message to his college. His life-work was 
more than presenting the evolution of the Eng- 
lish novel: it was a mission to students to se- 
cure on their part habits of reading and a taste 
for genuine literature which in after years 
would be to many the most priceless reward of 
their college days. It is not necessary that 
two college teachers should present the same 
truth in the same way, but when college pro- 
fessors and instructors, presidents, deans, and 
tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in for- 
mer days is a calling, not simply a means of 
livelihood, and that every man who holds any 
such position must somehow discover how to 
reach personally at least a small circle of stu- 
dents, then our colleges will not longer be de- 
fined as "knowledge shops," but as the homes 
of those inspirations and friendships, those 
ideals and incitements, which make life more 
than meat and the body than raiment. 
^~ While the drift of our modern life in the out- 
side world may be toward technical and sci- 
entific education, the drift in college is still to- 
ward the great teacher — the man of thought- 

88 



EDUCATION A LA CARTE 

provoking power and of spiritual capacity; 
sincere and genuine both in scholarship and 
manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle 
spoke of Schiller, "a high ministering servant 
at Truth's altar, and bore him worthily of the 
office he held." 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 



Ill 

THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

RUDYARD KIPLING speaks of four 
street corners of four great cities where 
a man may stand and see pass everybody of 
note in the world. There are likewise vantage- 
points in our American colleges from which 
one may discover not only the influential un- 
dergraduate types, but also the real life of their 
environment. One of these places is the col- 
lege campus. 

Undergraduate life falls into two broad 
divisions : college work, pertaining to the study 
and the classroom; and college relaxation, 
centering upon the campus. The latter in- 
cludes social Hfe, amusements, athletics, and 
the other voluntary exercises in which students 
meet for fellowship and competition. The 
close tie between college work and college play 
is often shown. A change in student senti- 
ment has instant effect on student work, while 

93 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

no rules of the faculty can nullify those deeply 
rooted principles of student life which make 
all college men akin. 



A WEST POINT INCIDENT 

This relation of student feeling to college 
authority was shown not long ago at West 
Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for 
having given the * 'silence" to an officer in the 
mess-hall during supper, for reasons deemed 
by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and dig- 
nity. The first silence occurred at supper. 
The whole corps of cadets, 450 men, were 
marched back to barracks supperless, and were 
placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at 
breakfast the cadets repeated the silence, for 
which they were returned to barracks, but not 
until they had been made to "double time" up 
and down the road for about twenty minutes. 
That morning the cadets had virtually no 
breakfast. At the next formation for mid- 
day dinner an incident occurred which struck 
a chord even deeper than discipline and au- 
thority, and broke the insubordination of the 
students. In the autumn one of the cadets 

94 




o 



c3 

a 
"a 
Q 



T3 

s 



Cfl 



THE CGi:.LEGE CAMPUS 

had brought from home a graphophone, and 
among the comic-song cylinders was one which 
pictured a non-domestic husband about to slip 
quietly away from home for an evening at the 
club, when his wife confronted him with the 
command. 

Put on your slippers ; you 're in for the night. 

This song was very popular with the cadets. 
They were drawn up in front of the barracks, 
every man indignant, obstinate, and deter- 
mined to repeat the silence, and to continue it 
even at the risk of starvation and confinement. 
At this critical moment the graphophone, which 
had been set to begin its work five minutes 
after its humorous owner had left his room, be- 
gan to sing in a high-pitched voice through the 
open window directly above the lines of cadets, 

Put on your slippers ; you 're in for the night. 

The effect was irresistible. It was like the 
changing of a current in an electric battery. 
The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact that 
they were at attention, sought the eyes of their 

97 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

fellows; their faces relaxed, then broke into a 
smile. By the time they reached the mess-hall 
the whole corps was laughing, and their sense 
of humor had swept away the sense of anger 
and pride. This was the beginning of the res- 
toration of the traditional West Point disci- 
pline. The campus had spoken to the class- 
room. 

"grown-up" collegians 

It is through an understanding of this spirit 
of the campus that the work of American un- 
dergraduates can be adjusted to modern de- 
mands. The work of the classroom and ex- 
amination-hall makes for democracy, while the 
social life of the college makes for conservatism 
and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly 
difficult to understand because of its growing 
complexity. The material needs of our time 
have created a class of undergraduates bent on 
becoming specialists, and these men have in- 
creasingly less time for either college work or 
college life; for them the undergraduate 
course is something to be hurried through as a 
short cut to professional efficiency. Even 

98 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

athletics and college affairs have only a slen- 
der hold upon these utilitarian specialists. 
They have a "grown-up" look on their faces as, 
eager for scientific research, they rush to and 
fro between their rooms and their labora- 
tories. 

Undergraduate life is now likewise influ- 
enced by the influx of students who are not the 
sons of college men, but who come from homes 
the chief ideals of which have been derived from 
counting-rooms and laboratories, from bro- 
kers' and railroad offices. These students, 
scions of a property-getting class, in conjunc- 
tion with the social and the scientific students 
in college, help to change the classical tradi- 
tions. They emphasize the campus side of col- 
lege life more than that of the lecture-room. 
Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than 
upon the library; the delights of scholarship 
influence them less than ambition for leader- 
ship and the importance of "making good" in 
student affairs. They are in college for "pop- 
ular" reasons, and too often fail to learn how 
to think. But they are eager, versatile, adapt- 
able, with a ready capacity for social adjust- 
ment and modern expression. 

99 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE 

Furthermore, the student world has been 
subdivided until it is a wholly different thing 
from what it was fifty or even twenty years 
ago. While in the seventies the college stu- 
dent knew every man in his class, in the large 
institution to-day an undergraduate will meet 
in the college yard scores of classmates who 
are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no 
more idea of speaking than to persons whom 
he has never seen before. The student who 
has been brought up always to dine in a dinner- 
coat will have for his table-companions 
men who have never owned a dress-coat and 
who see no immediate prospect of needing 
one. 

The influx of foreign students has added to 
the cosmopolitan life of American institutions. 
So far as they are Orientals, the English de- 
partments are specially modified both in the 
character of the attendance and the instruction 
by their presence. The professor's task of ad- 
justing instruction to a mixed assembly of 
American, Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, 
Chinese, and Japanese students may be in- 

100 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

f erred from the answer of a young East Indian 
student who was asked to describe in English 
his daily routine: 

At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then 
I employ myself till 8 o'clock, after which I employ 
myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweet- 
meat, and just at 9% I came to school to attend my 
class duty, then, at 2^ p. m. I return from school and 
engage myself to do my further duties then I engage 
for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study till 5 p. M., 
after which I began to play anything which comes in 
my head. After 8I/2 h^lf P^ss to eight we are began 
to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o' 
he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to 
read still morning. 

The familiar din of dishes at the commons 
of Columbia, as well as at the University of 
California, serves to raise the pitch of a poly- 
glot table-talk that often represents a dozen 
nationalities. Last year in American colleges 
there were hundreds of undergraduates of 
alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments, 
and religion. Among these were a specially 
important delegation of three hundred Chinese 
young men who were beneficiaries of the Boxer 
indemnity fund. These students from for- 

101 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

eign nations still further subdivide under- 
graduate life through their race clubs, soci- 
eties for learning English, special religious 
conferences, and new studies. 



COLLEGE TRADITIONS 

College tradition adds its distinctive and 
forceful factor to the campus life of the under- 
graduate, particularly in the older seats of 
learning. A good tradition makes it easy to 
accomplish things worth while without the 
spasmodic campaigns that characterize many 
younger institutions. Students are often more 
zealous to uphold the ancient customs of their 
college than anything else connected with it. 
The annual conflicts between freshmen and 
sophomores have become a part of the insti- 
tution. Certain traditional habits, often 
humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, 
have grown up in nearly every North 
American college. An old account of life 
at Cambridge tells of the manner in which 
both occupant and furniture of a freshman's 
room were menaced by a missile as big as a 
cantaloupe that was thrown into it. It was de- 

102 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

scribed as a transmittendam (it went with the 
room), and was handed down in some such 
forcible manner from one generation of fresh- 
men to another. The desire to link the past 
with the present at Harvard is also shown in 
the custom of registering the name of each oc- 
cupant on the doors of certain old frame build- 
ings long used as lodging-houses by students. 
The old college pump has been a traditional 
means of grace to many freshmen, and the cus- 
tomary restriction to upper classmen of caps, 
canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to 
undergraduate life. 

College tradition is not an unmixed blessing 
when it results in provincialism and the loss of 
that breadth of mind and appreciative sym- 
pathy which should characterize educated men. 
When any undergraduate body becomes 
blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn 
from other institutions ; when faculty and stu- 
dents take the position that because certain 
ideas have never prevailed at their college, 
therefore they never should and never shall 
prevail, they show their unfitness for leader- 
ship in an age of vast and varied opportunity. 

The students of the Middle West and the 
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WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

Far West are more sensible of their freedom 
from the past than are our Eastern under- 
graduates. They realize that they are at least 
a hundred years behind Eastern colleges in the 
dignity of their traditions, and they therefore 
seek to crystallize college spirit about college 
customs; but their customs do not interfere 
with progress, as sometimes happens in the 
East, and a question is decided on its merits 
quite regardless of precedent or policies. If 
a proposition seems sensible and right, it is 
adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with 
tradition. Keeping close to modern needs, 
those colleges have gone ahead and accom- 
plished things while more conservative institu- 
tions have been leisurely thinking about them. 
It is this audacity of spirit, this dash and action, 
which endear to the undergraduates of the 
West all men of achievement. When among 
them one thinks of the old verse : 

Oh, prudence is a right good thing 
And those are useful friends. 

Who never make beginnings 
Until they see the ends, 

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THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

But now and then give me a man 

And I will make him king. 
Just to take the consequences. 

Just to do the thing. 

THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES 

Traditions are closely connected with col- 
lege gaiety, and gaiety forms a real part of 
the comprehensive life of the American stu- 
dent. "Cheerfulness," says Arnold Bennett, 
"is a most precious attainment." The under- 
graduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry be- 
hind him, and faces the world with a laugh. 

About his gaiety there is a kind of humor- 
ous bravado. He likes to defy the lightning. 
An old graduate of Princeton relates how, in 
1857, when the paper called The Rake, be- 
cause of its daring criticisms, had brought its 
editors under the ban of suspension by the 
faculty, the editors injected fun into the dis- 
mal situation by printing the statement, "We 
have authority for supposing that even the 
faculty do not cooperate as heartily with our 
undertaking as they could and should." 

At the University of Michigan a professor, 
lecturing on electricity, wished to show that the 

105 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

fur of a cat is raised by an electrical current. 
He asked one day, "Will some student bring a 
cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this 
experiment?" The next day every one of the 
forty students entered the lecture-room with a 
cat under his arm ! 

Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the col- 
legian in search of gaiety. Indeed, when one 
studies some of the mysterious happenings on 
and about the college campus, one ceases to 
wonder at the mechanical triumphs of the 
Egyptians. At one college which I visited, 
the stilly night was disturbed by half a hun- 
dred students who, with riotous yells, ran a 
two-horse wagon back and forth on an upper 
story of a college dormitory, to which place 
they had succeeded in hoisting it. This oc- 
curred at midnight, for the delectation of three 
hundred students and members of the faculty 
who were sleeping below. N^ext day the col- 
lege paper declared that the president of the 
institution had been seen at his bedside suppli- 
cating against earthquakes and thunderbolts. 

I once visited a small college where the 
chapel exercises were abruptly ended because 
six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed 

106 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred 
students marched into the chapel, the old Ger- 
man professor, who was deaf, began to play 
the organ. The commingled sounds that 
issued from that instrument when the levers 
began to work were described as extraordinary. 

Much of the enduring loyalty of college men 
clings about the memories of such events. A 
college president once said to me that some of 
the most important gifts to his institution 
came from men who remembered college fun 
and "idlesse" long after time had blotted out 
the serious impressions of the classroom. As 
one apostle of the easy-going side of student 
days has said: 

"There is some chill and arid knowledge to 
be found upon the summits of formal and la- 
borious science; but it is all around about you, 
and for the trouble of looking that you will ac- 
quire the warm and palpitating facts of life." 

Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct 
line between college fun and fundamental de- 
cency and good order. When this line is 
crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, 
if necessary, the laws of the land should be 
brought to bear upon the offenders. There 

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WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

should be no dallying with undergraduate law- 
breakers, no special exemptions for students. 
Reprehensible and even criminal acts have been 
committed by college men in the last few years 
which called for severer punishment than seem- 
ingly they received. It is no kindness to the 
undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty, 
ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated 
license. Respect for property and conventions 
should be impressed upon a boy before he 
reaches college age. It is because lawlessness 
has been tolerated by parents in the home, as 
well as by over-lenient masters at boarding- 
school, that we read continually of offenses 
against common sense and respectability, com- 
mitted by persons of supposed cultivation. 
Few things are more needed in American 
life to-day than strengthening the respect for 
discipline and lawful authority. 

COLLEGE men's HONOR 

Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all 
other college delinquencies, can be largely pre- 
vented by a consistent appeal to the under- 
graduate's sense of honor. Recently I asked 
the president of a North Carolina college what 

108 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

he regarded as the chief characteristic of 
American students. He replied promptly, 
"College honor." At Princeton, at the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, at Amherst, and at many 
other institutions, the honor system in exam- 
inations arranged and managed by students, 
represents the deliberate intention of the under- 
graduates to do the square thing. These 
laws, which the students voluntarily impose 
upon themselves, are enforced more vigorously 
than the rules of the faculty. 

A few years ago I visited a university at a 
time when the entire undergraduate body was 
deeply stirred over a matter that involved col- 
lege honor. A senior of high standing socially 
and intellectually, the son of a prominent 
family, high in popular favor, was overheard to 
use disrespectful language to his landlady. 
The senior was summoned before the student 
committee having charge of undergraduate 
affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed 
to make answer, and, being found guilty, 
was asked to leave the institution. His family 
and friends, incensed by this demand, which 
seemed to them both harsh and unjust, ap- 
pealed to the faculty for redress. The chair- 

109 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

man of the faculty replied that the matter was 
entirely in the hands of the students. Appli- 
cation was then made to the student commit- 
tee to present the young man's side of the ques- 
tion to the whole college. The student council 
readily acceded to this request, saying that 
they were perfectly willing to consider the 
charges more at length, as their only desire was 
to he absolutely just. When he went up for a 
new trial the young man's family engaged a 
lawyer. The student body also engaged 
counsel. The trial was held in one of the 
largest halls in the university town, and vir- 
tually the whole student body sat through 
the evening and far into the morning listening 
to the presentations of both sides. A judge 
who told me of the incident said that during 
those hours, looking into those student faces, 
he did not remember seeing any man change 
his expression, but that every one sat in the at- 
titude of seeking only the truth. The jury, 
which was chosen from the faculty and from 
impartial men in the town, found that the 
young man had actually used the words attrib- 
uted to him, and therefore pronounced him 
guilty of the charge. 

110 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

A few months ago an incident occurred at a 
Southern college that impressed me deeply. 
At one of a series of meetings which I was hold- 
ing, a student rose and said that he wished to 
make confession to the student body. He 
had recently won the sophomore- junior debate, 
but wished to confess that he had gained it un- 
fairly. He had overheard his opponent re- 
hearsing his debate in an adjoining room, and 
although he stopped his ears and refused to 
listen, his room-mate took down the points. 
Afterward, the debater said, the temptation 
was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged 
his own debate accordingly, and won. "But," 
he said with deep feeling, "I stole it, and I have 
come to plead the forgiveness of the student 
body." 

Very early the next morning a young man 
called at the house where I was being enter- 
tained, to tell me that he was the room-mate 
who had taken the notes mentioned in the con- 
fession. He, too, wished an opportunity to 
speak to the students. At the public meeting 
that evening, before three hundred college 
men, he rose and told of his all-night fight for 
character on the college campus. He de- 
ll! 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

scribed the humiliation which he saw confront- 
ing him if he should tell of his part in the dis- 
honorable proceeding, and said : 

"I was helped by a power beyond myself to 
make a clean breast of it. I am here to tell 
the students that I, rather than the man who 
spoke last night, should take the blame for 
stealing that debate." 

I do not remember ever having witnessed 
such deep feeling, or heard such applause in 
any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confes- 
sion. It was a triumph of college honor and 
integrity, rooted in manhood, conscience, and 
religion. 

SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES 

But the supreme opportunity for the incul- 
cation and employment of honesty is not re- 
served for examinations and public presenta- 
tions; it also belongs to the complex social life 
of the colleges, which has become important. 
The club-book of an Eastern university, for 
example, records the existence at that institu- 
tion of ninety different social organizations, the 
object of most of them being to bring men to- 

112 




Amateur College Theatricals 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

gether sociably. Such intermingling is vital 
for college friendship. It is true, as former 
Dean Henry P. Wright of Yale has said, that, 
to a student, a friend is a "fellow whom you 
know all about, and still like," and for that 
reason the social organizations which bring men 
together in an intimacy closer than is found 
anywhere else are indispensable aids in the for- 
mation of lasting friendships. 

The social groupings of college life are also 
important because they give an opportunity 
for concrete and tangible success through stu- 
dent leadership. College society, in fact, has 
brought into being a restricted, but very real, 
world, with special laws and a kind of 
public opinion founded on student initiative 
and sentiment. Responsibility and leadership 
in college affairs have given many an under- 
graduate the initial stir to the qualities which 
make him successful in after life. These fra- 
ternal bodies, democratic, discriminatingly 
alert for the best men, and usually emphasiz- 
ing worth rather than birth, are vital not only 
in the discovery of individuality, but also in 
their unique contribution to the corporate 
strength and unity of college life. 

115 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE 

The Greek-letter society is found at the 
heart of these undergraduate social activities. 
Indeed, fraternities have become in many in- 
stitutions as much the center of the college it- 
self as of college society. So far as social and 
moral influences go, the character of the fra- 
ternity which a young man joins is quite as im- 
portant as the college or university he selects. 
The fraternity students represent the "system" 
in college : they choose athletic managers, they 
exert the "pull" which controls editorship upon 
the college papers, they determine largely the 
presidents of classes, and in some cases the elec- 
tions to senior societies. 

The membership of the thirty-five national 
Greek-letter fraternities (not to mention a 
hundred or more local fraternities or the fifty 
fraternities of the professional schools) now 
comprises 200,000 undergraduates and grad- 
uates. These figures do not include the twenty 
intercollegiate sororities that claim 250 chap- 
ters and 25,000 members. Three hundred 
and seventy colleges and universities at pres- 
ent contain chapters of national Greek-letter 

116 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

fraternities, and millions are invested in the 
buildings of these societies. An almanac for 
1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses to Ameri- 
can colleges. Half a million dollars is invested 
in chapter-houses at the University of Michi- 
gan alone. The property of the eleven fra- 
ternities at Amherst had twenty times greater 
money value than Yale's available funds in 
1830; and the property of the fraternities at 
Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as 
great as the total productive funds of all the 
colleges at the beginning of the last century. 

The college fraternity or the college club be- 
comes responsible for a large and representa- 
tive part of the undergraduate life in America. 
It is usually responsible for the histrionics in 
university life, and there is perhaps no literary 
tendency more pronounced in our colleges to- 
day than that toward the making of the drama. 
Several important plays of recent years may 
be traced to graduates who were members of 
such clubs as "The Hasty Pudding" of Har- 
vard and "The Mask and Wig" of Pennsyl- 
vania. At a time when confessedly there is 
a crying demand for good, strong plays at the 
theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes 

117 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

of professors of dramatic literature are 
crowded. 

Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer 
simply a debating society; it is also a student- 
home. There is an increasing tendency, es- 
pecially on the part of state institutions, to 
make it possible for college fraternities to 
erect their buildings on the campus. Every 
fraternity-house is the product of much 
thought, liberal support, and often sacrifice, 
on the part of influential alumni. College au- 
thorities are seriously considering the many 
problems connected with these organizations, 
for thousands of undergraduates find their 
homes in them for four very impressionable 
years. The general attitude of the faculties 
is wisely not one of repression or of drastic reg- 
ulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of 
Brown has expressed it, of "sympathetic under- 
standing, constant consultation, and the en- 
deavor to enlist fraternities in the best move- 
ments in college life." 

There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the 
part of members of college fraternities to face 
the dangers as well as to enjoy the advantages 
connected with such societies. They realize 

118 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

that these organizations can be effectively in- 
fluenced only by a leavening process within the 
fraternity itself, for external pressure and 
rules have never yet succeeded in forming or 
changing student sentiment. The fraternity 
can establish manliness and decency, or sporti- 
ness and laziness, as its ideals, and these ideals 
are clearly reflected in the membership. The 
inclination of these bodies to assume definite 
responsibility for the moral welfare of their 
members is indicated by the action of some of 
the old national fraternities, which have chosen 
eflicient field-secretaries to travel among the 
chapters in order to study conditions and to as- 
sist in the direction, control, and general bet- 
terment of fraternity activities. The type of 
men selected for membership is being more 
carefully scrutinized. In a considerable and 
growing number of institutions, students are 
not chosen for membership until the end of the 
freshman year; there is thus needful oppor- 
tunity on both sides for more intelligent choice. 
More and more the cooperation of fraternity 
alumni is being sought by the authorities. 
These graduates, who are often largely respon- 
sible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are 

119 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

justly called upon by the college to assist in 
maintaining proper regulations within them. 
Moreover, assurance is given that the frater- 
nity itself wishes to cooperate with the faculty 
in securing a higher grade of scholarship, 
which fraternity life too frequently menaces, 
and in demanding the reform of conditions 
leading to delinquency of all kinds. There is 
no police force really effective for a college 
community but a student police force, and this 
operates not by external pressure, but by in- 
ternal persuasion. 

A real danger of the modern college fra- 
ternity lies in its distraction from the real work 
of the college — study and the intellectual life 
— through habits of indifference, laziness, or 
immorality. The chapter-house tends to sug- 
gest that college work is optional, not impera- 
tive. "Thou shalt not loaf!" as an eleventh 
commandment, written across the doorposts 
of a fraternity club-house in the Middle West, 
is no inappropriate injunction. The undue 
and distressing waste of time in inconsequent 
and foolish play, the inevitable interruptions, 
the dissipations of social events, the inane prof- 
ligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the feeble 

120 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

conversations that "skim like a swallow over the 
surface of reality" — all these are too often the 
doubtful compensations received by the college 
man as fraternity privileges. 

"The modern world is an exacting one," says 
ex-President Woodrow Wilson, "and the 
things that it exacts are mostly intellectual." 
One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities 
of America, how large a place this intellectual 
work holds in college life. Was that Eastern 
college professor justified in saying that some 
fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer 
down East who was usually to be found in a 
comfortable arm-chair in the post-office, and 
when asked what he did, replied, "I just set 
and think, and set and think, and sometimes I 
just set/^ The fraternity-house that becomes 
a place to "set" rather than a place to work is 
hardly a credit to a college campus. As Presi- 
dent Northrop said to some society men at the 
LTniversity of Minnesota, "If your fraternity 
is not a place for intellectual and moral incite- 
ments, it is a failure, and it must go the way of 
all failures." 

Among other gifts, the American college 
fraternity may justly be expected to bestow 

121 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

upon its members devoted friendship, the 
ability to live successfully with other men, and 
such habits of application, industry and sobri- 
ety as develop ideas and character. 



THE UNDERGRADUATE S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE 

But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy 
life of the fraternity chapter-house should not 
leave the impression that the American under- 
graduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or 
that he fails to formulate a philosophy of life. 
Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks, "There are 
some people, and I am one of them, who think 
that the most practical and important thing 
about a man is still his view of the universe." 
Certain beholders of collegiate conditions have 
evidently become acquainted with only those 
students who have thoughtlessly taken their 
serious views, in second-hand fashion, from 
their ancestors or from current opinion. 
These spectators have perhaps justly concluded 
that the undergraduate has no view of life — 
no view, at least, which is complimentary to 
him. 

Such an impression is not general among 
122 




The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

those who are famihar with the inner working 
of the undergraduate mind and have watched 
the result of his philosophy in practical works. 
Many of the vital movements of the time have 
originated among these seemingly thoughtless 
college men. It was in a small room at Prince- 
ton, in the year 1876, that Cleveland H. 
Dodge, W. Earl Dodge, and Luther D. 
Wishard, after earnest conversation regarding 
the moral and religious life of the institution, 
decided to send delegates to the next year's 
Convention of the International Committee of 
Young Men's Christian Associations, held in 
Louisville, Kentucky. This delegation pre- 
sented to the International Committee plans 
for the Student Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation at Princeton. Other groups of un- 
dergraduates took similar action both in 
America and in other countries, until at pres- 
ent the World's Student Christian Federation 
includes 148,300 students and professors in its 
membership. These federated movements 
represent twenty-one nations. In connection 
with these societies during the last college sea- 
son 66,000 students met regularly for Bible 
study. 

125 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

These associations at the colleges have given 
rise to many other organizations which have 
stimulated the educated life of the world. 
The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign 
Missions, which originated in connection with 
a student conference at Mount Hermon, Mas- 
sachusetts, in the year 1886, has been respon- 
sible for enlisting thousands of collegians who 
have been sent by churches and Christian or- 
ganizations to serve in foreign lands. This 
student missionary organization is also accom- 
plishing an educational work in familiarizing 
undergraduates with the social, political, and 
religious conditions of foreign nations. The 
college Christian associations now have 163 
graduates among their employed officers in the 
institutions of higher learning in North Amer- 
ica. 

Undergraduate philosophy of life is an evo- 
lution. It consists of three stages: the first is 
characterized by a sense of calamity or fear as 
the student leaves behind the observances and 
conventional creeds of childhood, held with un- 
questioning and often unthinking assent. He 
begins to think for himself. He enters an at- 
mosphere of thoughtfulness and scientific dis- 

126 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

covery, an environment in which facts come be- 
fore opinions. His first alarm is because he 
thinks he is losing his religion. He says, like 
the prophet Micah, when the hostile Danites 
took away his images, "Ye have taken away my 
gods . . . what have I more?" 

In the second period of his thinking he 
changes his early ceremonial god for breadth 
of mind. He revels in his impartial view 
of men and the universe. By turns he 
calls himself a pantheist, a pragmatist, 
or an agnostic. His religious position is at 
times summed up in the description of a young 
college curate by a bishop who said the young 
man arose in his pulpit with a self-confidence 
begotten of fancied wisdom, saying to his ex- 
pectant hearers : "Dearly beloved, you must re- 
pent — as it were ; and be converted — in a meas- 
ure; or be damned — to a certain extent!" 

The third stage of the undergraduate's phi- 
losophy is usually in line with constructive ac- 
tion. He begins to be interested in doing 
something, and practice for him, as for men 
generally, helps to solve the riddle of the uni- 
verse. The best test of college theology or 
college philosophy is its serviceableness, its 

127 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

power to attach the student to something which 
needs to be done, and which he can do. Many 
an undergraduate whose college course has 
seemed an intellectually unsettling period has 
found himself upon solid ground as soon as he 
has begun seriously to engage in the world's 
work. 

Indeed a strikingly aggressive social propa- 
ganda is now in operation in the North Ameri- 
can colleges. The college student, like the 
modern American, is a practical being and is 
interested in securing practical results. His 
first question regarding any movement usually 
is, "What is it doing that is really worth 
while?" Recently a graduate of an Eastern 
university was secured to give his entire time 
to the study and promotion of social service 
in the colleges of the United States and Can- 
ada. 

An example of such service is demonstrated 
by the social work that the University of Penn- 
sylvania is doing in connection with its settle- 
ment house in Philadelphia, which is owned 
and conducted by the Christian Association of 
the university. The settlement, erected in the 
river-front district, immediately opposite the 

128 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

university, at Lombard and Twenty-sixth 
streets, consists of a group of buildings built 
at a cost of $60,000; a children's playground 
adjoining the house; an athletic field across the 
river; and, forty miles from Philadelphia, a 
beautifully situated farm of sixty-four acres, 
used for a camp for boys and girls, for mothers 
and children, in the summer months. Every 
year one hundred students and members of the 
faculty take part in the active service and sup- 
port of the settlement. Among the activities 
are the following : Boys' and girls' and adults' 
clubs; industrial classes; athletics; dispensary; 
modified milk station; visiting physician; resi- 
dent nurse; public lectures; entertainments; 
religious meetings; social investigation; politi- 
cal work; and the usual activities of a play- 
ground, athletic field, and summer camp. 
Former residents and volunteer workers of the 
settlement are scattered throughout the world 
engaging in social and religious work. Four 
are medical missionaries in China, one is a mis- 
sionary in Persia, another in Honolulu, an- 
other in South America, while three are holding 
prominent positions in social work in this coun- 
try. 

129 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS 

Such works, with numerous other tendencies 
which might be mentioned in the hne of unpaid 
and voluntary service for college publications, 
musical organizations, debating organizations, 
and athletics, lead one to define the American 
undergraduate's philosophy of life as one of 
service. Unlike the German or Indian, his 
seriousness is not associated with metaphysical 
or theological discussion or expression. He 
asks not so much What? as What for? His 
aims belong to "a kingdom of ends." Student 
theory operates in a real world — a world where 
contact is not so marked with creeds and laws 
as with virile movements and living men. 
The undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel 
of action. To him "deeds are mightier things 
than words" are. His spirit slumbers under 
sermons and lectures upon dogma and descrip- 
tion, but rises with an heroic call to give money, 
time, and life for vital college or world enter- 
prises. Difficulties stir him as they always stir 
true men. He admires the power that is 
"caught in the cylinder and does not escape in 
the whistle." More and more plainly in all 

130 



THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 

his undergraduate and graduate work the 
American student is reveahng his love and 
ability for that serviceableness to the state, to 
the church, and to industrial life which, though 
often unpaid and unappreciated, brings to the 
servant a satisfying reward in the doing. 

A few years ago a Harvard athlete played 
in a hard and exciting foot-ball game against 
Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it 
was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled 
through the Yale line in a play that shortly 
afterward resulted in giving the game to the 
Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony 
of circumstance that just before time was called 
the heroic player was disqualified. When the 
game was over and the crimson men were 
marching wildly about the field, yelling for 
Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on 
their shoulders, the man whose playing was 
largely contributory to this triumph was down 
in the training-quarters, almost alone, but with 
the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the 
crowd, he had "played the game." Certain 
alumni, who had seen this man's plucky but 
unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to 
him these words of Kipling: 

131 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

And only the Master shall praise us^ and only the Mas- 
ter shall blame; 

And no one shall work for money, and no one shall 
work for fame, 

But each for the joy of the tvorking. ... 

We must admit that the midergraduate's 
philosophy of Hfe may be obscure at times, 
even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive 
as the moods of youth; and that its expression 
is as cosmopolitan as nationality, and as varied 
as human nature. For some students, too, we 
must conclude that trivialities and immoralities 
bury far out of sight the true meaning of col- 
lege training and life-work; but in other stu- 
dents, and these are the majority, underneath 
his curriculum and his customs, his light-heart- 
edness, his loves, and his seeming listlessness, 
one may discern the real American under- 
graduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and 
strenuously eager for those great campaigns 
of his day and generation in which the priceless 
guerdon is the "joy of the working." 



REASONS FOR GOING TO 
COLLEGE 



IV 

REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

RECENTLY I attended the commence- 
ment exercises at one of our large uni- 
versities. As undergraduates and friends of 
the graduating class were gathered in a large 
church awaiting the arrival of the procession, 
in a seat directly in front of me sat a middle- 
aged woman and a man whose appearance and 
nervous expectation drew general attention. 
The man's clothes were homely and of coun- 
try cut. His face was deeply lined, and wore 
the tan of many summers. I noted his hard, 
calloused hand resting on the back of the seat 
as he half rose to look at the door through 
which the seniors were to enter. The woman 
by his side was a quiet, sympathetic person to 
whom a phrase from Barrie would be appli- 
cable: she had a "mother's face." 

While many eyes were turned toward the 
old couple, the commencement procession en- 

135 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

tered the church. The two seemed scarcely 
to notice the dignitaries who led the proces- 
sion, but their eyes were straining to catch the 
first glimpse of the seniors. At least half of 
the audience were now interested in this father 
and mother. The latter suddenly placed both 
hands upon the man's arm. Her face beamed, 
and an answering light appeared in the face 
of a strong young man who marched near the 
head of the seniors. That day some persons 
in the audience heard only listlessly the com- 
mencement speeches. Instead, they were pic- 
turing the couple back on an upland farm of 
New England, dedicating their lives to the 
task of giving their boy the advantages which 
they had never received, and which they must 
have felt would separate him forever from 
their humble life and surroundings. It had 
been no easy path up which this pair had 
struggled to the attainment of that ambition. 
This was the day of their reward. All the 
gray days behind were lost in the radiance of 
pride and love. The father was full of joy 
because he had had the privilege of working 
for the boy, while to the mother it was enough 
that she had borne him. 

136 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

Such scenes are still frequent in commence- 
ment time, and they are significant. Does it 
really pay to send boys to college in America? 
Is the game worth the candle? Is the con- 
temptuous notice placed by Horace Greeley 
in his newspaper office still applicable: "No 
college graduates or other horned cattle need 
apply"? We can probably take for granted, 
as we consider the vast expenditure of money 
and time and men in the cause of American 
education, that the people of the country are 
believing increasingly in the value of college 
training; but to many persons there arises the 
question, To what college shall we send our 
young hopeful? There is even a more basic 
question. Why go to college at all? 

Rather than theorize on this subject, I 
asked one hundred recent graduates of North 
American colleges to tell me what decided 
their choice of an institution, the chief values 
derived from their college course, and the ef- 
fect of college training upon their life-work. 
The following is a summary of the testimony 
thus obtained: 



13T 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

GRADUATE TESTIMONY CONCERNING COLLEGE 

I. What were the reasons that led you to choose 
your college? 

Financial reasons 40 

Influence of friends or relatives . . .18 
Type of the alumni . . . . . . .32 

Standing of the institution 10 

II. What do you consider the most important val- 
ues received from your college course? 

Broader views of life 21 

Friendships formed .18 

Training or ability to think .... 7 
General education as foundation for life- 
work 11 

Influence of professors 36 

Technical training 7 

III. In the light of your experience, what would 
you suggest to a boy relative to the kind of 
preparatory school to choose? 

High school or public school .... 45 

Academy or private school 33 

A school emphasizing athletics . . . .22 
IV. Did your college training decide your life- 
work ? 

Decision before going to college . . . 32 

Decision during college ..38 

Decision after graduation 2 

Not yet fully decided .28 

The values of a college course are strikingly 
138 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGEi 

presented by the following answers: A Johns J 
Hopkins man attributes to his university "a 
desire for, search after, and acceptance of the 
truth regardless of the consequences." A re- 
cent alumnus of Boston University says: *'I 
learned to have a far broader view of what 
teaching (my profession) really is. When I 
entered college I regarded it as a process of 
instilling a knowledge of facts in a young per- 
son's mind ; when I was graduated I knew that 
this was a very small part, merely a means to 
the great end — the development of person- 
ality." A graduate of the University of 
Georgia says that his college course meant to 
him "a self-unfoldment, a diversity of inter- 
ests in life, a growth of ideals, of purposes, 
and of judgment; strong convictions and 
friendships." A student from the School of 
Mines in Colorado considers the chief value of 
his college training was the giving him "a 
vision of a life-work instead of a job"; a grad- 
uate of the University of Louisiana writes 
that the chief value to him was "a realization 
that I was worth as much as the average man" ; 
while an alumnus of Vanderbilt University 
said that his course gave him "the feeling of 

139 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

equality and of opportunity to do things and 
be something along with other men. It has 
meant, perhaps, a greater chance to do my 
best." 

CHOOSING A COLLEGE 

The choice of a college, according to this 
testimony, is largely dependent upon one of 
three things, — the location of the institution 
(involving expense), the influence of friends 
or relatives, and the advantages the institu- 
tion may offer for special training. The se- 
lection of the college, however, is not so im- 
portant as formerly. Every prosperous in- 
stitution now gives sufficient opportunity for 
the acquirement of knowledge and training. 
Apart from the prestige which the name of a 
large and well-known university or college 
gives to its graduates in after life, the differ- 
ence between the values imparted by scores of 
American institutions is not considerable. 
There are at least a hundred institutions in 
America sufficiently well equipped to give a 
boy the foundation of mental training that a 
college education is intended to supply. 
Their libraries are filled with books; their 

140 




Blair Arch, Princeton University 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

laboratories contain expensive and elaborate 
modern appliances; their gymnasiums are 
preeminent in equipment; their instructors 
are drawn from the best scholars in the coun- 
try and also from the finishing schools of Eu- 
rope; the spirit of athletics and undergraduate 
leadership are, as a rule, strongly emphasized, 
while the fraternity and social systems afford 
rare opportunities for friendship. Tempta- 
tions and college evils vary comparatively lit- 
tle in different institutions. 

The advantages of contact and the acquire- 
ment of experience through the laboratory of 
a big city institution are frequently more than 
counterbalanced by the close fellowship and 
the lack of distractions in a small country col- 
lege. It is true that the investigators of the 
Carnegie Foundation found a large variation 
in the amount of money expended by different 
institutions to educate a student. It is my be- 
lief, after visiting more than five hundred in- 
stitutions in North America, that the quality 
of instruction in any one of these institutions 
of the first grade does not vary sufficiently to 
render the choice of a college on the ground of 
educational advantages a matter of great mo- 
ld's 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

ment. The values which the small college 
loses from inferior equipment are usually off- 
set by the more direct access of the student to 
the personality of the teacher, and often by 
closer friendships with fellow-students. 

Indeed, educational results are not always 
commensurate with material advantages. As 
President Garfield said, a man like Mark 
Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student 
on the other end is still the main essential of 
a college. Many years ago Henry Clay vis- 
ited Princeton, and was asked by President 
McLean (Johnnie, as he was familiarly and 
popularly called) to sit down in the presi- 
dent's study. The furniture was not elabo- 
rate in those days, nor did it consist of the 
most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down, and 
the rickety old chair which was proffered him 
sank beneath his weight. The statesman, 
rising from the floor, said solemnly, "Dr. Mc- 
Lean, I hope that the other chairs of this in- 
stitution are on a more permanent founda- 
tion." Indeed, the foundation of learning in 
those days was laid upon the personality of 
great teachers who, like Dr. McLean, had per- 
sonal contact with the students, making up in 

144 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

individual interest what was lacking in ma- 
terial equipment. 

It is important that the student should 
choose instructors quite as carefully as insti- 
tutions. What a man selects when he gets to 
college — his studies, his teachers, and his 
friends — ^will prove far more vital to him than 
the institution he happens to choose. 

IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION 

Whether in college or out in the world, the 
important thing is that college gives an op- 
portunity not only for the acquirement of 
knowledge, but also for the matching of that 
knowledge against real problems. Some- 
thing definitely good is derived from new ad- 
justments. Education can never be com- 
pleted at home. The college boy returns to 
his old home with new reverence, with a new 
conception of its meaning. He has secured a 
vision that enriches and liberates by getting 
in touch with universal interests. He has got- 
ten out of himself into the life of others. 

College brings together ideas and action. 
It is the practice-ground for honor and square- 

145 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

dealing. A championship base-ball game was 
played recently between Wesley an and Wil- 
liams at Williamstown. This game was the 
last one of a series, and it was to decide which 
college should hold the championship for the 
coming year. The tension was naturally 
great. At the end of the seventh inning the 
score stood 1 to in favor of Wesley an. 
The last Williams man at the bat knocked a 
slow "grounder" to the short-stop. In throw- 
ing it to first base, he drove it so high that the 
first baseman, in attempting to get it, stepped 
about an inch off the base. The umpire 
called the man out, but the Wesleyan first 
baseman, going up to the umpire, said, "That 
man was not out." Williams finally won 
that day, but Wesleyan had the satisfaction 
of knowing that their man had "played the 
game." 

TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 

One of the chief functions of the American 
college is to discover the man in the student, 
and to train him for citizenship and public 
service. President Hadley of Yale points 
out the fact that of the twenty-six presidents 

146 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

of the United States, seventeen were college 
men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were 
graduates of the old-fashioned classical col- 
leges. Grant was a West Point man, Mon- 
roe and McKinley left college before the end 
of their junior year, one to go to the army, and 
one to teach school. This contribution of in- 
dividual leadership to a nation seems to be 
proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says: 

If a college man has used the opportunities offered 
by the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of his- 
tory and a broad view of public affairs. If he has util- 
ized the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he 
has acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip 
upon public opinion, and has had considerable experi- 
ence in dealing with a large variety of men. All these 
things give him an advantage in the race, and statistics 
show that he makes good use of this advantage. 

This power of the American college to de- 
velop individual initiative and leadership has 
been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The 
college in the United States has gradually de- 
veloped from a quasi-family institution for 
growing school-boys to a small world of wide, 
voluntary opportunity for young men. There 

147 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

is a decided difference between American un- 
dergraduate life to-day and that of a century 
ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys 
were graduated at eighteen or nineteen years 
of age, and they were under the watchful eye 
of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were 
in loco parentis. The earlier period was a pe- 
riod of flogging and fagging and "freshmen 
servitude rules." Indeed, the age was one of 
black-and-blue memories derived from those 
educational lictors who with their rods made 
deeper impressions than all the Roman Cassars. 
Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the 
president's or professors' dooryards or within 
ten yards of a president, eight rods of a pro- 
fessor, or five of a tutor. These young men 
were forbidden to run in the college yard or 
up or down stairs or to call to any one through 
a college window. Seniors had the power to 
regulate the dress and the play of underclass 
members. In those early days fines and pen- 
alties for misdemeanors ran from half a 
penny up to three shillings, while sophomores 
had their ears boxed before the assembled col- 
lege by the president or a member of the fac- 
ulty. The conclusion of the college prayer 

U8 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

indicated the enforced humility of students in 
those days: "May we perform faithfully our 
duties to our superiors, our equals, and our 
inferiors." 

American college life had its rise in New 
England institutions presided over by rigor- 
ous Puritans whose hands were as hard as 
their heads, who believed in total depravity 
and original sin, and who held the young 
sternly to account for any remissness. In 
those early days student community life dif- 
fered little from student home life; both failed 
dismally to develop initiative or individual re- 
sponsibility. They were characterized by 
strict authority on the part of the parent and 
teacher, and ingenious attempts to outwit this 
authority on the part of the young. It was 
this conception of the college which led the 
Massachusetts legislature to give the Harvard 
faculty authority to inflict corporal punish- 
ment upon Harvard students. At that time 
it was easy for a student to determine his life- 
work, for the great majority of boys either 
entered the ministry, or studied law or medi- 
cine. The whole college living was simple 
and homogeneous. 

149 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES 

Existence in the modern American college 
is quite another thing. In the college itself 
there has arisen an interminable round of 
activities which make demands on the talents 
and abilities of students. Managerial, civic, 
social, religious, athletic, and financial leader- 
ship is exemplified in almost all colleges. Un- 
dergraduate leadership is the most impressive 
thing in college life. One reason for the 
sway of athletics over students exists in the 
fact that through these exercises the student 
body recognizes real leadership. Loyalty to 
it is repeatedly seen. At a small college the 
students may elect their best pitcher as the 
president of the senior class; their best jumper 
for the secretary; and, regardless of the sub- 
tlety of the humor, may choose their best run- 
ner for the treasurer of the class. The presi- 
dent of another college has estimated that in 
his institution the regular college activities 
outside of the curriculum reached a grand to- 
tal of twenty-seven, and included everything 
from the glee-club leader to the chairman of 
an old-clothes committee. The dean of an- 

150 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

other institution who felt this overwhelming 
change in student affairs is quoted as recom- 
mending "a lightening of non-academic de- 
mands upon the students." 

A college man is surrounded, therefore, 
with ample opportunity for individual devel- 
opment. His habits and his executive abilities 
are considered quite as important as his 
"marks" when the final honors are awarded. 
In short, the real government of our large 
North American institutions is to-day in the 
hands of the students, however much the fac- 
ulty may think that they wield the scepter. 
Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, 
fraternity life, self-support, curriculum, sem- 
inars, unrestrained electives, student re- 
searches, and laboratory methods — all these 
are signs of the new day of student individ- 
ualism. The parental form of government is 
less popular; the self-government idea is now 
the slogan in student life. The dogmatic col- 
lege president whom I met recently in a West- 
ern State who insisted that in Ms college there 
shall be no fraternities or no athletics is 
marching among the belated leaders of modern 
education. Meanwhile embryonic statesmen 

151 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

and railroad managers are discovering them- 
selves and their life-work in the society and 
poHtics of undergraduate days. In the ninety 
per cent, of his time which it is estimated the 
American undergraduate spends outside of his 
recitations, there is increasingly the tendency 
to make the college a practice-ground for the 
development of personal enterprise, individu- 
ality, and efficiency. 

LEARNING TO THINK 

At least twelve college presidents have said 
to me during the last year that in their judg- 
ment the chief advantage of a college course 
is learning to think. It has been stated by 
Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie that to Ameri- 
cans no conquests are possible save those 
which are won by superiority of ideas. Pro- 
fessor George H. Palmer tells an anecdote of 
a Harvard graduate who came back to Cam- 
bridge and called upon him to express his 
gratitude for certain help which had come to 
him in Professor Palmer's classroom, and 
which had directly influenced his life. The 
professor, naturally elated, hastened to in- 

152 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

quire what particular remark had so influenced 
the young man's career. The graduate re- 
plied: "You told us one day that John Locke 
insisted on clear ideas. These two words 
have been transforming elements in my life 
and work." 

The colleges liberate every year a tremen- 
dous vital force, which is a prodigious energy. 
It may drive men aimlessly into all kinds of 
trifling, display, and doubtfully acquired pos- 
sessions, or it may be harnessed to clear ideas 
and sturdy convictions on the great subjects 
of nationalism, industrialism, and enlighten- 
ment through schools and art and literature 
and religion. Education in the fullest mean- 
ing of the term is the source and secret of 
American success. Some of our colleges are 
older than the nation. Harvard was founded 
in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in 
1701, Princeton in 1746, all before our dis- 
tinctively national life began. The colleges 
are the training centers of the nation's life, 
and to the trained men of any nation belong 
increasingly the opportunities and the prizes 
of public life. Bismarck was sagaciously 
prophetic when he said that one-third of the 

153 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

students of Germany died because of over- 
work, one-third were incapacitated for leader- 
ship through dissipation, and the other third 
ruled Germany. The future welfare of the 
peoples of the earth is in the hands of the men 
who are being trained by the schools for serv- 
ice and public leadership. The power of 
leadership is developed in part at least by the 
expression of ideas in writing and speaking. 
President Eliot is quoted as saying that the 
superior effectiveness of some men lies not in 
their larger stock of ideas, but in their greater 
power of expression. Many a student has 
learned to give expression to his ideas and con- 
victions, and many an editor has found his vo- 
cation, by writing for the college journals. 

COLLEGE JOURNALISM 

But the condition of college journalism at 
present does not confer high honor on the 
American undergraduate or on American col- 
leges. When we look beyond the college 
daily, we find literary periodicals nearly at a 
standstill as to funds and ideas. In the Mid- 
dle West especially, the editors of literary 

154» 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

journals spend a good part of their time in 
drumming up delinquent subscribers. The 
principal activity manifested by many a col- 
lege literary magazine is to start and to stop. 
They resemble the ephemeral Edinburgh uni- 
versity magazine, described by Robert Louis 
Stevenson: "It ran four months in undis- 
turbed obscurity and died without a gasp." 
To the modern era of literary productiveness 
the college man, at least while in college, 
seems to be a comparatively small contributor. 
The best men are needed to make college jour- 
nalism popular, for deep within most students' 
hearts is a love for real literature; as one stu- 
dent said recently, "Many a man is found 
reading classic literature on the sly." It may 
seem to an outsider that the student usually 
prefers his heroes to be visible and practical, 
jumping and fighting about on the athletic 
field, much as certain persons prefer to hear a 
big orchestra, the players in which can be seen 
sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather 
than to listen to mysterious, sweet, but unseen 
music. Some day strong college leaders will 
rise up to champion college journalism and 
college reading as to-day they fight for ath- 

157 



• WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

letics. Then college sentiment will make pop- 
ular the pen and the book. 

When book-life is as popular as play-life, 
college conversation will have new point; the 
fraternity man will be able to spend an hour 
away from the "fellows" and the rag-time 
piano, and the docile professor, starting out 
reluctantly to visit his students, will not need 
to pray "Make me a child again just for to- 
night!" as he immolates himself for a long, 
dreary evening trying to smile and talk wisely 
of college politics and base-ball averages. 



A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE 

How is the undergraduate to be interested 
in writing? How can college journalism be 
made to take a real hold on the undergradu- 
ate's hfe? One might answer, present litera- 
ture and writing in an interesting manner, 
bring out the humanity in it; for, above all, 
the undergraduate is intensely human. New 
college ideals and interests have been born, 
and have grown up in a new age of literary 
aspiration and method. The times demand 
literature instinct with human interest, vital 

158 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

with reality. We may quarrel with the type; 
we may call it vulgar and yellow and thin and 
realistic, but the fact remains that it is the lit- 
erary temper of the day; and there are those 
whose opinions are worthy of consideration 
who believe that this new realism in literature 
is by no means to be treated lightly, even in 
comparison with the poetic and stately form 
of Elizabethan letters. 



BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The opportunity offered for cultivating ac- 
quaintance with good books is not the least 
reason for spending four years in a college at- 
mosphere. In the year 1700, when William 
and Mary were on the throne of England, 
James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine 
of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it 
is recorded, met at Branford, Connecticut. 
Each of the eleven brought a number of books, 
and, laying them on the table, said, ''1 give 
these books for the foundation of a college in 
this colony." This was the early foundation 
of Yale. The influence of such foundations 
upon the ideals of American students has been 

159 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

considerable. Many a man has discovered in 
college what Thackeray meant when he wrote 
to his mother in 1852, "I used, you know, to 
hanker after Parliament, police magistracies, 
and so forth; but no occupation I can devise 
is so profitable as that which I have at my 
hand in that old inkstand." Robert Louis 
Stevenson — and who can forget him in think- 
ing of books? — said twenty years after his 
school-days, "I have really enjoyed this book 
as I — almost as I used to enjoy books when I 
was going twenty to twenty- three ; and these 
are the years for reading. Books," he contin- 
ued, "were the proper remedy: books of vivid 
human import, forcing upon the minds of 
young men the issues, pleasures, business, im- 
portance, and immediacy of that life in which 
they stand ; books of smiling, or heroic temper, 
to excite or to console ; books of a large design, 
shadowing the complexity of that game of con- 
sequences to which we all sit down, the hanger- 
back not least." 

HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING 

Some critics tell us that the undergraduate 
160 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

of to-day reads only his required books, and 
talks nothing but athletics. One gets the im- 
pression that the average college man feels 
about his prescribed work in literature much 
as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father's heavy 
volumes. "No good for reading." The 
fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. 
There is need for a change of method in inter- 
esting students in books. Too early special- 
ization has frustrated the student's literary 
tendencies. College men are forced into 
"original research" before they know the 
meaning of the word bibliography. They 
rarely read enough of any one great author to 
enter into real friendship with him. Class- 
room study is often microscopic. Literature 
is made easy for the student by the innumer- 
able sets of books giving dashes of the world's 
best literature, and chosen from an utterly 
different point of view than the student would 
take were he to make his own choice, thus often 
prejudicing him against an author whom he 
might otherwise have loved. 

Grammatical and syntactical details too 
often obstruct the path to the heart of classical 
education. A student in one of our colleges 

161 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

had read the first six books of Vergil's iEneid 
in a preparatory school, and when his father 
asked him what it was about, answered, "I 
hadn't thought about that." The real charm 
and interest of this classic had entirely es- 
caped him. It had been buried beneath a 
mountain of philology. When we fail to 
make the student realize that the best litera- 
ture of the world is interesting, why should 
we wonder that the student's literary realm is 
invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, 
the humanly human though indelicate me- 
moirs which tend frequently to keep the mind 
in the low and morbid levels? 

Emphasis is needed on a few great books, 
not upon everything. The student is often 
discouraged by long lists of books, and it fre- 
quently happens that he reads without assim- 
ilating. A college friend of mine became an 
example of devotion to Bacon's injunction 
about reading until one becomes a "full man." 
He was literally full to the brim and running 
over with reading. He rarely laid down his 
books long enough to prepare for his course 
lectures; he certainly never stopped long 
enough to think about what he had read. His 

162 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

chief delight was in recounting the titles of 
the books he had consumed in a given period. 
He was something like Kipling's traveler in 
India, who spent his time gazing intently at 
the names of the railway stations in his 
Baedeker. When the train rushed through 
the station he would draw a line through the 
name, saying in a satisfied manner, "I've done 
that." 

The undergraduate's reading may be made 
pleasurable instead of being a painful duty. 
Books ought to open new rooms in his house 
of thought, start new trains of ideas and ac- 
tion, help him to find his own line, give just 
views of the nation's history and destinies, im- 
part a mental tone, and give a real taste for 
literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. 
College reading should also awaken the soul 
of the student and attach his faith to the loy- 
alties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me 
recently that his team was defeated in the last 
half of the game because of a lack of physical 
reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, 
to the other team in their technic, they fol- 
lowed the signals, but they had not trained 
long enough to secure the physical stamina 

16S 



\ 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

which is always an element of success in the 
last half of the game. Good reading is good 
training. Good books give mental and spir- 
itual reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the 
mind and heart with the kind of knowledge 
that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in 
a crisis. The best books assure power in the 
right direction. A student whose mind is 
filled with the best will have neither time nor 
inclination for the literature that appeals only 
to a liking for the commonplace and the sen- 
sational. It will be unfortunate if Tenny- 
son's indictment against an English univer- 
sity become true of our American teachers: 

Because you do profess to teaoh, and teach us nothing. 
Feeding not the heart. 

To find not simply the laws of chemical 
and electrical action, but also the laws of the 
mind and the spirit, the nature of life and 
death, and the character of "that power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness" — all 
this should determine the lines of reading for 
students outside of their specialty. Such 
reading is not for acquisition, for attainment, 

164 



■»•'■«:*»•■■"'■?:»•; 




The Libraiy and the Thomas Jefferson Statue, University 
of Vireinia 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

or for facts alone; it is for inspiration and 
ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate 
joy derived from all things real and beautiful. 



THE PIONEER SPIRIT 

College training brings with it responsibil- 
ity and reward. The responsibility is that of 
leadership — ^the kind of leadership which 
comes to the man of advanced knowledge and 
unusual advantages, who sees the needs of his 
time and does not flinch from the hardest kind 
of sacrifice in view of those needs. The re- 
ward is not always apparent to the world, but 
it is more than sufficient for the worker. In- 
deed, the American undergraduate is becom- 
ing more and more aware that his pay is not 
his reward. He is learning that the world is 
not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to 
reward professional leadership with material 
values. Furthermore, his half-paid service 
does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice. 
His work is often lost in the successes of some 
other man who follows him. But the college- 
trained man who has weighed well these needs, 
and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied. 

167 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more 
to be envied. He is under the impulsion of an 
inner sense of mission. The college has given 
him faith in himself and his mission. Many 
a graduate, going out from American halls 
of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle felt 
when he said: "I have a book in me; it must 
come out," or as Disraeli intimated in his an- 
swer when he was hissed down in the House of 
Commons, "You will not hear me now, but 
there will come a time when you will hear me." 
The undergraduate, spending laborious 
days upon the invention which shall make in- 
dustrial progress possible in lands his eyes 
will never see, is carried along by an impulse 
not easily expressed. He reahzes the feeling 
that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed when 
he said about his writing that he felt like 
thanking God that he had a chance to earn his 
bread upon such joyful terms. He has delib- 
erately turned his back upon certain temporal- 
ities in order to face the sunrise of some new 
ideal for social betterment or national prog- 
ress. He has heard the gods calling him to 
some far-reaching profession that is more than 
a position. There is stirring in him always 

168 



REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 

the sense of message. He has caught the 
clear, captivating voice of a unique hfe-work. 
It urges him on to the occupation of his new 
land of dreams. Is this leader worried be- 
cause some one misunderstands him? Does 
he envy the man who, following another ideal, 
sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps his 
own particular genius has made possible? 
The pioneer of letters who has known the 
sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the 
fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activ- 
ity in which ideas are caught and crystallized 
in words, does not despair when his earthly 
rewards seem to linger. 

The college, then, is a means only to the 
larger life of spirit and service. It exists to 
point out the goal the attainment of which lies 
inherent in the student. The college is like 
the tug-boat that pulls the ship from the har- 
bor to the clear water of the free, open sea. 
The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, 
the patriotism of the college spirit, the build- 
ings, and the men, are only torches gleaming 
through the morning shadows of the student's 
coming day. 



169 



THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE 
WORLD 



THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

HOW crooked can a modern business man 
be and still be straight?" 

This question was propounded at a college 
dinner in New York by a young lawyer who, 
in behalf of the recent graduates of an Eastern 
university, had been asked to give utterance to 
some of the first impressions of a young alum- 
nus upon his entrance into the life of the world. 
The question was not asked in a trifling man- 
ner, but it represented the query which inevi- 
tably arises in the mind of the graduate of 
ideals and high desires who to-day leaves his 
alma mater to plunge into the confused busi- 
ness and professional Hfe of our times. 

The question awakens the inquiry as to 
whether the colleges of America are to-day 
sending into the world trained leaders or sub- 
servient followers; whether graduates enter 
their special careers with a real message and 
mission, or whether, however optimistically 

173 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

they may begin their work, their high purposes 
are buried or not beneath the rush of practical 
and material affairs. 

More than half a million students are to-day 
studying in our secondary schools and institu- 
tions of higher learning, with a money expense 
to the nation involving many millions dollars. 
Tens of thousands of teachers and trained edu- 
cators are devoting years of hard and faithful 
service in preparing these American youths 
for life. Are these students, after gradua- 
tion, assuming real leadership ? Are they con- 
tributing vision, judgment, and guidance in 
great national enterprises sufficiently definite 
and valuable to compensate the country for 
the sacrifices in time, money, and life that are 
made for the support and continuance of our 
educational institutions ? 

There seems to be a difference of opinion 
concerning this subject even in these times of 
vast educational enterprises. A business man 
of high repute wrote to me recently as follows : 

I do not consider that our colleges are meeting the re- 
quirements of modern business life. From your own 
observation you must know that the most conspicuously 
successful people in business were conspicuously poor 

174 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

at the start, both finacially and educationally. Grover 
Cleveland, who was not a college graduate, once said 
that the perpetuity of our institutions and the public 
welfare depended upon the simple business-like arrange- 
ment of the affairs of the Government. 

This is the frequently expressed opinion of 
men of business and affairs, who present the 
successful careers of self-made men as an 
argument against collegiate education. This 
argument, however, fails to take into account 
that the same dogged persistence which has 
brought success to many of our present-day 
leaders in industrial and national Hfe would 
have lost nothing in efficiency by college train- 
ing. 

Ask these masters of the business world who 
have risen by their individual force what they 
most regret in life. In nine cases out of ten 
the answer will be, "The lack of an oppor- 
tunity for education." And they will usually 
add: "But my sons shall have an education. 
They shall not be handicapped as I have 
been." For the practical proof of the genu- 
ineness of this feeling, one has simply to read 
over the names in the catalogues of the great 
universities and colleges of America, where 

175 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

the names of the sons of virtually all the great 
business and professional men will be found. 

While, therefore, we must take it for 
granted that Americans generally believe 
in a collegiate education, we may still ques- 
tion whether the colleges are really equip- 
ping for leadership the young men whom 
they are sending into our modem life. What, 
after all, do the colleges give? Out of one 
hundred graduates whom I asked what they 
had gained in college, twenty-one said, 
"Broader views of life," or perspective. Long 
ago John Ruskin said that the greatest thing 
any human being can do in the world is to see 
something, and then go and tell what he has 
seen in a plain way. To make the under- 
graduate see something beyond the common- 
place is still the purpose of education. This en- 
larged vision is often the salvation of the indi- 
vidual student. It furnishes the impulse of a 
new affection. It attaches him to some great, 
uncongenial task. It gives him a mission 
great enough and hard enough to keep his feet 
beneath him. It saves him by steadying him. 



176 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

THE AET OF RELAXATION 

But no graduate is equipped for either 
mental or moral leadership until he has learned 
the art of relaxation. Both his health and his 
efficiency wait upon his ability to rest, to relax, 
to be composed in the midst of life's aifairs. 
A real cause of American physical breakdown , 
has been attributed by a famous physician "to 
those absurd feelings of hurry and having no 
time, to that breathlessness and tension, that 
anxiety of feature and that solicitude of 
results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, 
in short, by which with us the work is apt to 
be accompanied, and from which a European 
who would do the same work would, nine times 
out of ten, be free. It is your relaxed and 
easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite 
thoughtless most of the while of consequence, 
who is your most efficient worker. Tension 
and anxiety, present and future all mixed up 
together in one mind at once, are the surest 
drags upon steady progress and hindrances to 
our success." 

We find that one of the supreme purposes 
of education in ancient Greece was to prepare 

177 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

men to be capable of profiting by their hours 
^f freedom from labor. In his writing upon 
education, Herbert Spencer gives special 
attention to the training that fits citizens for 
leisure hours. 

The American college graduate is quite cer- 
tain to receive early the impression that effi- 
ciency is synonymous with hustling ; that mod- 
ern life, in America at least, as G. Lowes Dick- 
inson has said, finds its chief end in "accelera- 
tion." His danger is frequently in his inabihty 
to concentrate, to compose himself for real 
thoughtful leadership. Many a graduate 
takes years to get over that explosive energy 
of the sophomore, which spends itself with- 
out result. He takes display of energy for 
real force. His veins are filled with the hot 
blood of youth. He has not learned to wait. 
He is inclined to put more energy and nervous 
force into things than they demand. Like all 
youth, he is inclined to scatter his energy in 
all directions. He is therefore in danger 
sooner or later of breaking down physically or 
mentally, or both, and in spending the time 
which should be utihzed in serviceableness in 
repairing the breakages of an uneconomic 

178 




Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, 
University of Chicago 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

human machine. The average American 
graduate rarely needs Emerson's advice for a 
lazy boy, which was, "Set a dog on him, send 
him West, do something to him." 

College training must give a man perma- 
nent idealism. Too often the graduate is 
inclined to fall into the line of march. He 
begins to worry and to lose his attractive 
gaiety and buoyancy. His habits of thought 
and studj/ are soon buried beneath the myriad 
details of business life or nervous pleasures. 

e becomes anxious about things that never 
happen. His anxiety about future happen- 
ings or results takes his mind from present 
efficiency. He^becomes tense and tired and 
irritable. The attitude of composure and 
self-assurance which for a time he possessed in 
college is changed to a fearsome, troubled state, 
the end of which is the sanatorium or some- 
thing even more baneful. I have sometimes 
thought that for a month at least I should like 
to see the office signs, "Do it now," "This is 
my busy day," "Step quickly," replaced by 
the old scriptural motto, "In quietness and 
confidence shall be your strength." 

How shall our colleges assist American 
181 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

youth to secure the art of relaxation and to 
obtain the abihty to relieve the tension of the 
workaday world by beneficial and delightful 
relief from business strain? Such gifts will 
often be the chief assets of a college man's 
training. Business men, and professional men, 
too, frequently reach middle life with no inter- 
est outside their specialties. When business 
is over, life is a blank. There are no eager 
voices of pleasant pursuits calling them away 
from the common round and routine tasks. 
It is too late to form habits. The rich 
rewards that education may give in leisure 
hours are lost, swallowed up by a thousand 
things that are merely on the way to the 
prizes that count. This is a terrific loss, and 
for this loss our colleges are in part at least at 
fault. 

In certain institutions, however, we discover 
teachers who realize that a real part of their 
vocation consists in giving to at least a few 
students habits of real and permanent relaxa- 
tion. 

^ In a New England college recently I found 
a professor spending two afternoons a week in 
cross-country walks with students to whom he 

182 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

was teaching at an impressionable age habits 
that could be continued after college days. 
These walks occurred on Sunday and Thurs- 
day afternoons. With rigid persistence he 
had followed the plan of walking with his stu- 
dents for six or eight months, a sufficient time 
in which to form habits. He explained his 
object by saying that during his own college 
career he had engaged in certain forms of ath- 
letics which he was unable to pursue after 
graduation. While his college physical train- 
ing had benefited him physically, he neverthe- 
less found himself quite without habits of bod- 
ily relaxation. He was deprived of appara- 
tus and the opportunity for many out-of-door 
games, but had found an immense value in 
walking. In passing on to these college boys 
this inclination for out-of-door relaxation, he 
was perhaps contributing his chief influence as 
a teacher. 

Why should not habits of this kind be defi- 
nitely organized and carried out by the physi- 
cal departments of our colleges? The oppor- 
tunity to study trees, plants, and animals, and 
to become watchful for a hundred varying 
phases of nature, would furnish no small 

183 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

opportunity for projecting the influence of col- 
lege into later life. 

These tendencies toward relaxation take 
different forms according to individual tastes. 
One graduate of my acquaintance finds outlet 
for his nervous energy in a fish-hatchery. To 
be sure, he bores his friends by talking fish at 
every conceivable opportunity, and people fre- 
quently get the impression that his mind has a 
piscatorial rather than financial trend, as he 
loses no opportunity to dilate upon his latest 
adventure in trout; and yet his physician was 
doubtless right in saying that this man, the 
head of one of the largest financial institutions 
in America, owes his life as well as his success 
to this special form of relaxation. 

A graduate of one of our large Western 
technical schools who is at the head of a big 
steel foundry has a private book-bindery, 
where with two or three of his friends the life of 
the world is lost evening after evening in 
the quiet and delightful air of books and book- 
making. The best treatises upon book-bind- 
ing line the walls. Old and rare editions of 
the most famous masters are carefully shel- 
tered in cases of glass. One end of the room 

184 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

is filled with his printing and binding-machines. 
He showed me a beautifully bound vol- 
ume which he himself had printed and bound. 
As he lovingly fingered the soft leather, read- 
ing to me his favorite passages from this mas- 
terpiece, I discerned in him a different man 
from the one I had often seen sitting in his 
grimy office discussing contracts for steel rails 
for China and bridge girders for South Amer- 
ica. A deeper, finer man had been discovered 
in the hours of recreation. When asked how 
he happened to become interested in a matter 
so antipodal to his life-work, I found that the 
tendency started in college days, when he had 
been accustomed to browse among the books 
in the old college library under the faithful 
and regular guidance of a professor who once 
every week took his students to the library 
with the express purpose of inculcating a love 
for old and beautifully bound books. 

The college, moreover, should start the 
graduate interest in philanthropic and serious 
enterprises which in themselves furnish suit- 
able as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds 
of American university men. Letters re- 
ceived from scores of recent graduates, 

185 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

many of whom are taking a large share in 
moral, social, and philanthropic endeavors, 
state that the beginnings of their interest 
dated with their experience in the Christian 
associations, settlement houses, boys' clubs, 
and charitable organizations of college days. 
One man of large philanthropic interest re- 
ceived his first view of a field of opportunity 
and privilege by hearing a lecturer on a social 
betterment tell of finding a homeless boy hov- 
ering over the grating of a newspaper build- 
ing on a winter night. The story touched a 
chord deep in the hearer, who saw this vision 
of a world until then unknown to him — a 
world of suffering and hunger and cold; and 
when in later life it was made possible, he de- 
voted his influence and his fortune to the erec- 
tion of a home for friendless boys. 

What is the college accomplishing toward 
the solution of that vital subject, the question 
of the immigrant? The possibilities of deal- 
ing with such far-reaching international prob- 
lems is indicated by the influence of a college 
debate upon the subject, "What shall we do 
with the immigrant?" Through his reading 
and investigation of the subject, a certain stu- 

186 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

dent who engaged in this debate received his 
first impetus toward what has proved to be 
one of the main contributions of his life to the 
nation by the estabhshment of Italian colonies 
that are probably as effective as any plans 
which are being suggested or utilized for the 
betterment of our foreign population. 

MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS 

According to President John G. Hibben of 
Princeton, graduates on the average earn only 
six dollars per week at the start. He justifies 
this low earning power by saying, "It is our 
endeavor to create a high potential of mental 
possibility rather than actual attainment." 

We are inclined to consider efficiency only 
as expressed along social, economic, industrial, 
or mechanical lines. It is not strange in a 
period when financial standing bulks large in 
the minds of a comparatively new people 
that the recognition of the learned classes 
should be less noticeable than formerly. Yet 
reactive tendencies from strictly utilitarian 
education are evident. Individual and ideal 
aims of education are beginning to emerge. 

187 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

above the commercial and mechanical aims. 
Already the salaries of college presidents and 
college teachers are increased, offering addi- 
tional incentive for men of brains and schol- 
arly achievement. Masters of industry who 
have been slaving for industrial and social 
progress are now becoming eager to push their 
accomplishments onward to mental and spirit- 
ual satisfactions. How otherwise can we ex- 
plain such establishments as the Carnegie 
Foundation, the millions of Mr. Morgan for 
art, the vast sums contributed to rehgion and 
education in this and other lands? The ethi- 
cal and social ideals of to-day are attaching 
thousands of our best youth to far-reaching 
endeavor. There is a new quest for that phi- 
losophy of life which, as Novalis stated it, 
could indeed bake no bread, but would give us 
God, freedom, and immortality. These are 
the signs of a new age of mental productivity 
— an age in which scholarship and learning 
will have a value for themselves; when people 
will appreciate that it is not merely the book 
one studies, but how he studies it that counts; 
that if we can produce a man of scholarly, 
thoughtful ability, we are sending into the 

188 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

world a person who will be proficient along 
any line in which he may engage. 

In a Harvard address a few years ago, it 
was remarked by Mr. Owen Wister that 
America possessed only three men of unques- 
tioned preeminence to whom students could 
turn for academic tuition in their respective 
lines. I believe it was Edmund Gosse who 
said that America had not produced a single 
poet deserving to rank with the unquestioned 
masters of English poetry. While these 
statements may be questioned, one realizes the 
general truth behind them when we contrast 
the marvelous and expensive architectural 
equipment of American universities with the 
paucity of great men and teachers. 

The trend of the times, however, is slowly 
but certainly toward a new individualism. 
Attention is being focused more and more 
upon the values of life rather than upon the 
volume of life. The college graduate may 
not be able to deliver an oration in Hebrew 
in the morning and in Latin in the afternoon, 
but he is able to think through and around his 
problem, and this is mental resourcefulness, 
truly a chief aim of collegiate education and 

189 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

one of the first necessities for success. Emer- 
son's prophecy may be realized in our day: 

Perhaps the time has already come, when the slug- 
gard intellect of this continent will look from under its 
iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world 
with something better than the exertion of mechanical 
skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship 
to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The 
millions that around us are rushing into life cannot al- 
ways be fed on the sere remains of frozen harvests. 
Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new 
age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now 
flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day 
be the pole star for a thousand years. 

The challenge is to our undergraduates. 
And it will be accepted. The colleges will 
teach men to think, to be mentally alert and 
resourceful, and then the man will count in the 
leadership of modern life, in the sense in- 
tended by Dr. Simeon who, upon seeing a 
trained graduate approach, exclaimed, "There 
comes three hundred men." 

In order to accomplish this, however, the 
college must make it a point to teach princi- 
ples rather than dogmatic methods. Too 
often our systems of learning are too bookish. 

190 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

The boy is inclined to get the impression that 
there is only one way to do a thing, and that 
is the way he has learned from his professor 
or his text-book. A business man told me 
that he was recently obliged to dismiss one of 
his college graduates because the young man 
could not see or think of but one way to work 
out a mechanical proposition. His training 
had circumscribed him, cramped, limited, and 
enslaved him instead of freeing him. He was 
unable to move about easily in his sphere of 
chosen activity. He had gained a prejudice 
rather than a principle. He still lived in a 
classroom, though out in the world. His prog- 
ress was water-logged in academic conserva- 
tism. 

LIFE-WORK PROPAGANDA 

It is, moreover, time for constructive action 
on the part of both college and alumni in the 
matter of directing students to their proper 
calling. While it is impossible for our col- 
leges to make great men out of indifferent 
raw material, it is possible to assist undergrad- 
uates to discover their inherent bent or capac- 
ity. Until the student has made such a dis- 

191 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

covery, the elective system which is now gen- 
eral in our American institutions is something 
of a farce. The lazy student, undecided in 
his vocation, uses it as a barricade through 
which he wriggles and twists to his degree, or 
at best is tempted in a dozen various direc- 
tions, selecting disconnected subjects, in no 
one of which he finds his chief aptitude. The 
elective system to such a student is an art-gal- 
lery without a key, a catalogue without the 
pictures. He does not know what he wishes 
to see. 

This undergraduate ability or inclination is 
not easily grasped either by himself or by 
others. It requires study and discriminating 
sympathy, to extricate a main desire from 
many incidental likings. Frequently the de- 
sire itself must be virtually created. It is a 
common remark among American undergrad- 
uates, "I wish I knew what I was fitted for." 
The college is under deep obligation to serve 
the nation not merely by presenting a great 
number of excellent subjects, which, if prop- 
erly selected, will land the young man in 
positions of leadership and usefulness; but it 
may and must go beyond this negative educa- 

192 



S^k'^^^^^^.'*^v'^':'^^^- 




The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the 
Triangle, University of Pennsylvania 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

tion, and assist the student actually to form 
his life purpose. 

American institutions of learning are at 
present neglecting an opportunity par excel- 
lence for presenting different phases of life- 
work to undergraduates, especially empha- 
sizing the relation of this life-work to the great 
branches of leadership and modem en- 
terprise. There are hundreds of students 
being graduated from our institutions to- 
day who have not decided what they 
are to do in after life. Even if we assume 
that these men are prepared in an all-round 
way for life, it must be realized that they are 
severely handicapped by the necessity of try- 
ing different lines of work for years after 
graduation before fixing upon their perma- 
nent vocation. They not only miss the tre- 
mendous advantage of enthusiasm and im- 
pulse of the young, but they are also in danger 
of drifting rather than of moving forward 
with positive and aggressive activity. 

A NEW COLLEGE OFFICER NEEDED 

I see no possibility of bringing undergradu- 
ates to a decision of their proper life-work with- 

195 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

out the assistance of a new office in our educa- 
tional institutions. A man is needed who can 
treat with students with real human interest, 
as well as with teaching intelligence. He 
should not he the college pastor, who is looked 
upon as a professional religionist, and there- 
fore shunned by many students who need him 
most, but one definitely and actively responsible 
for the development of leadership. He 
should be a close student of college affairs, 
sympathetic with students, human, high- 
minded, natural, and keenly alive to humor 
and social interests. In some institutions this 
man might hold the leadership in philanthropic, 
religious, and social-service interests. It 
might be his privilege to arrange lectures by 
leading men of the country who were filled 
with zeal for their callings. The man who 
could make possible the endowment of such a 
chair in a great university would be doing a 
great work for his country. 

LEARNING AND INVESTIGATION 

But while the American undergraduate may 
consistently look to the college to furnish him 
with ideals and with the methods of making 

196 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

these ideals eiFective, the world looks to the 
college for definite and advanced information. 
The college, with its accumulated stores of in- 
tellect, its apparatus, and its unusual means 
for observation, owes the world a debt that 
none but it can pay. And this is the gift 
which the college has given, and is still giving, 
to the world so quietly, so unobtrusively, that 
the world scarcely dreams of the source of its 
gain. Let one think of the myriad signs of 
modern progress by which society is being con- 
stantly carried forward. Behind the scenes 
you will find some quiet, hidden worker in a 
laboratory or library, an unpractical man per- 
haps, but one through whom a new realm of 
possibilities in science or industry or letters 
have been revealed. 

What is the world's interest in these men — 
men who are so generally underpaid that 
much of their best work is made impossible by 
the necessary outside labors to support their 
families, who, beyond their own personal satis- 
faction, have as little recognition as perhaps 
any workers of modern society? When the 
world demands expert knowledge in industry, 
science, literature, and art, the college may 

197 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

well reply, "When are you going to show your 
gratitude for the self-sacrifice and far-reach- 
ing labors of thousands of devoted men whose 
work is both a challenge and an example to the 
world to-day?" 

And this example of the man who learns to 
devote himself to one thing is not lost upon the 
undergraduate, to whom example is ever 
stronger than precept. Indeed, it is this tend- 
ency to learn how to do one thing well that is 
bringing the colleges into the attention of the 
modern world. The secret of genius is to be 
able to seize upon some concrete, near-at- 
hand piece of work, to see it with unobstructed 
and steady vision, and then, out of the rich 
treasure of knowing how to do one thing thor- 
oughly, to draw by insight and expression the 
general principle. 

For, after all, the contribution of the col- 
lege to the world is often one which cannot be 
fully analyzed. It is not discovered in a thor- 
ough knowledge of a curriculum or in the 
statistics of athletics any more than a foreign 
country is discovered in a guide-book or in a 
hasty recital of its industries. There is no 
master word to express what a college career 

198 



COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 

may mean or should mean to American youth 
who in years of high impression experience 
with a multitude of their fellows. 

Days that flew swiftly like the band 
That in the Grecian games had strife. 

And passed from eager hand to hand 
The onward-dancing torch of life. 

After we have said much concerning the life 
and the work of the American undergraduate, 
there is still a valuable thing which the college 
should impart to him, and through which he 
should become enabled to present with greater 
charm and with greater force the message 
which is in his soul. This valuable thing, at 
once both idealism and incentive, is the under- 
graduate's individual message to the world. 
It may be composed of knowledge, the ability 
to think, the faculty of relaxation, and the 
power to do faithfully and successfully some 
given task. These things, however, are all 
dependent upon the spirit of the actor, upon 
his vision, his determination, his ambitious and 
unflagging attempts. The true modern 
university contributes to the world a great- 
minded and a great-hearted man, to whom col- 

199 



WHY GO TO COLLEGE 

lege life has been a soul's birth as well as a 
mind's awakening. It gives to its youth that 
pecuUar but indispensable thing which burned 
in the heart of the young art-student who 
stood before the masterpiece and said, "I, too, 
am a painter." 



END 



200 



INDEX 



INDEX 

A 

Action the Gospel of the Undergraduate 130 

Agricultural Colleges, Attendance at 56 

Alden, Henry M 40 

Alien Influences in College Life 101 

American Undergraduate Life 8 

Amherst College honor system 109 

Amherst College, value of fraternity property 117 

Amherst College, plan proposed to abolish the B. S. degree. .53 

Analysis of attitude of the Undergraduate 6 

Anecdotes, humorous 19-20 

Anecdotes of the working of college honor systems 110-111 

Appleton Chapel 16 

Arnold, Matthew, quoted 4, 84 

Athletics fifty years ago 38 

Athletics in colleges 31 

Athletics over-emphasized in American colleges 33 

Attendance of students at state and representative univer- 
sities 56 

B 

Bacchic element among undergraduates 26 

Barrie, James 135 

Base-ball game, an exhibition of honor 146 

Bennett, Arnold 105 

Benson, A. C 74 

Bible classes, attendance .25 

Bible study, great organizations for 125 

203 



INDEX 

Bible teaching, inadequacy of 85 

Billings, Josh, quoted 78 

Bismarck, quoted 154 

Book-binding as a relaxation 184 

Book-life in college 158 

Books and the undergraduate 159 

Books, influence of 164 

Boston University 139 

Branf ord, Conn 159 

Bryce, James, quoted 72 

Bushnell, Horace 40 



Cambridge, old life at 102 

Campus and schoolroom 98 

Carnegie Foundation 143, 188 

Carlyle, Thomas 4, 89, 169 

Chesterton, Gilbert K 132 

Chief end of an American college 58-62 

Choosing a college 140 

Church history, inadequately taught 85 

Church membership 25 

Classroom presentation of the professor 77 

Clay, Henry 144 

College, a means to the larger life 169 

College and the immigrant question 186 

College clubs responsible for large part of undergraduate 

life 117 

College, constructive action of 191 

College develops individual initiative 147 

College fraternities, dangers of 120 

College graduates in the missionary field 26 

College graduates of fifty years ago versus those of to-day 71 

College journalism 154 

College men and the world 173 

College men as leaders of reform movements 29 

204 



INDEX 

College men should be makers of public sentiment 60 

College slang 15 

College spirit 39 

College teachers, what they lack 75 

College traditions 103 

College work and college relaxation 93 

College Y. M. C. A 25 

Colleges and the requirement of modern business life 174 

Colleges, dates of founding 153 

Colorado School of Mines 139 

Columbia University 31 

Columbia University, financial statistics 57 

Columbia University, report of plan to establish the uni- 
versity system 66 

Columbia University, value of fraternity property .117 

Commercialism in American universities 58 

Cornell University, financial statistics 57 

Cosmopolitan life at college 100 

Courses of study, tendency towards the practical 51 

Criticisms of American colleges .3 

D 

Dangers of modern college fraternities 130 

Degrees, radical plan proposed at Amherst college 53 

Dickinson, L. Lowes 178 

Discipline emphasized by athletics 39 

Disraeli, quoted 168 

Dodge, Cleveland H 135 

Dodge, W. Earl 135 

Drummond, Henry, quoted 16 

Dyke, Henry van 34 

E 

East Indian student's description of his daUy routine 101 

Eastern universities, attendance at 56 

Editors of The Bake suspended , 105 

205 



INDEX 

Education the secret of American success .153 

Education to meet popular demands 65 

Elective studies 63 

Eliot, President of Yale 154 

Emerson, Ralph W. 40, 46, 181, 190 

English literature, inadequately taught 85 

Enrollment in agricultural and mechanical colleges, 56; 
in Johns Hopkins University 56 

F 

Faculties' attitude towards fraternities 118 

Faunce, President of Brown University 118 

Fish-hatching as a relaxation 184 

Financial statistics of various colleges 57 

Foot-ball in colleges 37 

Foot-ball, instance at a Harvard- Yale game 131 

Foreign students in American colleges 100 

Forms of relaxation 183 

Fraternities, membership 116 

Fraternity alumni, cooperation of, sought 119 

Fraternity houses 117 

Fraternity houses, problems connected with 118 

Fraternity life in college 116 

G 

Garfield, James H 144 

German universities, research work in 70 

Gilman, Daniel Coit, President Johns Hopkins 73 

Gosse, Edmund 189 

Government by Undergraduates 150 

Graduate testimony concerning college 138 

Grant, Gen. U. S 147 

Greek letter societies 116 

Growth of practical education 55 

H 

Hadley, Arthur Twining, President of Yale 146 



INDEX 

Harkness, Albert 75 

Harper, Dr, William R 55 

Harvard University, date founded 153 

Harvard faculty authorized to inflict corporal punishment 149 

Harvard University, financial statistics 5T 

"Hasty Pudding, The," of Harvard 117 

Heine, Heinrich 18 

Hibben, John G 187 

History, two vi^ays of teaching 79 

Honor and square dealing 145 

Honor of the college men 108-113 

Honor systems 13, 109 

Hopkins, Mark 144 

Humor of the collegian 105-107 

Humor, sense of in undergraduate 17 

Humorous anecdotes 19-20 

I 

Ideals joined to action 145 

Immigrant question, the 186 

Individual character, the need of 62 

Individual training 146 

Influence of professors with students 87 

Influences on student life 99 

Irving, Washington 27 

J 

Johns Hopkins University 139 

Johns Hopkins University, financial statistics 57 

Johnson, Owen 4 

K 

Kipling, Rudyard 93, 131, 163 

L 

Lawlessness in college 108 

W7 



INDEX 

Learning and investigation 196 

Learning to think 152 

Lectures, making interesting 78 

Literature, new realism in 159 

Locke, John 153 

Longfellow, Henry W 40 

Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, President of Harvard 31 

Lowell, James Russell 46 

Loyalty to leadership 150 

M 

McLean, President of Princeton 144 

McKinley, WiUiam 147 

Mabie, Dr. Hamilton Wright 153 

"Mask and Wig, The," of University of Pennsylvania 117 

Mechanical colleges, enrollment in 56 

Membership of Greek letter societies 116 

Mental resourcefulness 187 

Micah, quoted 127 

Mission contributions 25 

Mission of the university system ....66 

Missions, origin of the student volunteer movement 126 

Missionaries, college graudates as 26 

Monroe, James 147 

Mount Hermon, Mass., conference resulting in organization 
of The Student "Volunteer Movement for Foreign 
Missions 126 

N 

Naturalness of the undergraduate 14-17 

Need of leaders in the world 59 

New college oflScer needed 195 

Northrup, Cyrus, ex-president of University of Minne- 
sota 76, 121 

208 



INDEX 
O 

Oxford University, opened to American students by Cecil 

Rhodes .70 

P 

Palmer, Professor George H 152 

Parallel courses, first conceded 69 

Parental sacrifices 8 

Paulding, James K 27 

Personality of great teachers 73 

Philadelphia, U. of P. settlement house 128 

Pierpont, James 159 

Pioneer spirit 167 

Practical courses of study the tendency 51 

Practical education, growth of 55 

Pranks of college undergraduates 106 

Predominant traits of college man 11 

Presidents who were college men 147 

Princeton University, date founded 153 

Princeton University, financial statistics 57 

Princeton honor system 109 

Princeton inception of World's Student Christian Federa- 
tion 125 

Princeton-Yale foot-ball anecdote 45 

Professor in the lecture room 77 

Provincialism as a result of college traditions 103 

Puritan influence on American college life 149 

R 

Reasons for going to college 135-169 

Reform movements, led by college men 29 

Relaxation, the art of 177 

Religion and the college man 23-26 

Research work in German universities 70 

Responsibilities of college fraternities 119 

209 



INDEX 

Rhetoric versus ideas 13 

Rhodes, Cecil 70 

Rossetti, D. G .161 

Rules of a New England athletic leader 14 

Ruskin, John 176 

s 

Settlement house of the University of Pennsylvania 128 

"Silence" insubordination at West Point 94 

Slang in college 15 

Slosson, Professor Elwin E 32, 57 

Social organizations in colleges 112 

Social service, promotion of 128 

Society life among undergraduates 112 

Soldiers' Field, Cambridge, memorial shaft 45 

Specialistic training 63 

Spencer, Herbert 178 

Spirit of college play life 41 

Stanford University, financial statistics 57 

State institutions, growth of 57 

State universities, attendance at 56 

Stevenson, Robert Louis 157, 160, 168 

Student individualism 151 

Student, the "for popular" reasons class 99 

Student Volunteer Movement of Foreign Missions, origin 

of 126 

Students, and their relationship to teachers 74 

Students' passion for reality 12 

Studies, choice of 64 

Studies, elective 63 

Systems of learning too bookish 190 

T 

Table^-talk in Columbia commons 101 

Taft, William H 29 

Teachers, for undergraduates, how to train 85 

210 



INDEX 

Teachers, need of 73 

Teachers' relationship to students 74 

Teaching a calling, not a means of livelihood 88 

Technical institutions, growth of 55 

Tennyson, quoted 76, 164 

Thackeray, W. M., quoted 160 

Town versus gown 5 

Training of the Individual 146 

u 

Undergraduate life of a century ago 148 

Undergraduate life, two divisions of 93 

Undergraduate, perversity of 4-11 

Undergraduate philosophy, three stages of 126 

Undergraduate — his naturalness 14-17 

Undergraduate, his passion for reality 11-14 

Undergraduate, his sense of humor , 17-20 

Undergraduate life, influences on 99 

Undergraduates and the temperance question 27 

Undergraduates as readers 161 

Undergraduates, bookrlif e of 158 

Undergraduates, gaiety of 105 

Undergraduate's philosophy of life 122 

Undergraduates* philosophy of serviceableness 130 

Undergraduates, play life of 29 

Uninteresting lectures 78 

University of California, Chinese students at 101 

University of California, financial statistics 57 

University of Chicago, financial statistics 57 

University of Georgia 139 

University of Illinois, financial statistics 57 

University of Iowa, faculty discussion 86 

University of Louisiana 139 

University of Michigan, chapter houses 117 

University of Michigan, financial statistics 57 

University of Minnesota, anecdote of ex-President Northrup.76 

211 



INDEX 

University of Minnesota, financial statistics 57 

University of Pennsylvania, settlement house in Philadelphia 128 

University of Pennsylvania, financial statistics 57 

University of Virginia honor system 109 

University of Wisconsin, financial statistics 57 

University system, its mission 66 

V 

Value, Prof. Washington, anecdote of 15 

Vanderbilt University 139 

Vocational versus classical education 55 

w 

Walking as a relaxation 183 

Ward, Artemus 31 

Washington and Lee University Mission students 26 

Wesleyan University 146 

West Point, an incident at 94 

William and Mary College, date founded 153 

Williams College 146 

Wilson, Woodrow 32, 77, 121 

Wishard, Luther D 125 

Wister, Owen 189 

Wright, Dean Henry P 115 

World's Student Christian Federation, organization of 125 

Y 

Yale anecdote 12 

Yale Mission in China 26 

Yale University, date founded 153 

Yale, early foundation of 159 

Yale University, financial statistics 57 



OCT 1 1912 



